Re: Vibrants (was: New conlang)

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005 19:13:45 +0300, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:

>>No - only that I have only noted it used specifically to refer to the very
>>small set of unusual sounds I referred to. I can't recall coming across
>>'percussive' as a term for taps/trills in the English-language phonetic
>>literature.
>
>And there's the imperfect again! "It USED specifically to refer to..." So IS
>there some difference between the term's current and older usage, or not??
>I don't think the name is suitable for trills at all, but it does seem to be
>essentially the same thing as a tap.
Nope, sorry - that was a typo on my part - should be "it *is* used' - the present usage of
percussive in phonetic literature (as far as I am aware) is restricted to s set of (at
present) three
symbols, denoting bilabial (Unicode 02AC), bidental (Unicode 02AD) and sublingual (Unicode 00A1
- identical to the 'inverted exclamation mark') percussives, which bear a sort of generic
resemblance to taps in that they are very brief contacts, but are considered a different kind of
mechanism.

>>Well, labial trills are inherently pre-stopped (ie, aways begin with a
>>labial stop articulation) while apical and dorsal trills are not.
>
>It is not physiologically impossible to begin a labial trill without
>closure; but yes, it _is_ much easier with it. So by "inherently" I guess
>you mean that no natlang attests a non-pre-stopped labial trill.
>(A xenosketchlang of mine does contrast /pB\/ with /B\/.)
Well, I can produce a bilabial trill from a position where my lips are close but not
actually closed,
but it takes much greater effort to make than one from full clsoure. And yes, I know of no natlang
that has non-prestopped labial trills (though not necessarily a labial stop - Liangshan Yi in
Sichuan China has labial trills as allophones of a labial fricative vowel /v/ after
both labial & dental
stops, and in one subdialect, even after palatoalveolar affricates (/pv, tv, tSv/ ->
[pB, tB, tSB])).

>>In the phonetic literature tap usually refers to either a motion upward of
>>the tongue tip or more generally a very brief contact, while flap generally
>>refers to a forward or downward motion (in particular, this describes the
>>distinction between a dental or alveolar tap vs a postalveolar/retroflex
>>flap).
>
>This seems to be closer to the actual reason for my impression since /B\/
>has the lips "flapping" outwards ... while /r R\/ remain at (relatively) one
>place along the POA axis; the movement being parallel to it.
In the case of labial trills, it is, obviously, the lips themselves that are
subjected to the Bernoulli
effect - while in apical it is the tongue tip and in uvular trills it is the uvula
itself. Since the lips are
a larger mass, they exhibit greater motion during oscillation. I'm not really sure that you could
characterize the lips as travelling between two places on the POA axis...

Bfowol