Re: Vibrants (was: New conlang)

>Nowadays 'rhotic' is usually used to cover all 'r'-type sounds including
>apical taps, flaps, trills, fricatives & approximants and uvular
>trills/taps, to the specific exclusion of labial trills.
And it's naturally quite unusable as an articulatory supergroup (unlike
"obstruent" or "continuant" etc.) It's not the "r-ness" I'm concerned about,
but rather the articulatory classification of those phones which can not be
assigned a place on the closure scale (stop affricate fricative approximant
vowel).

...But that gives me an idea; a non-human species could have a different
"rhotic"-style categories of phones, so between some sister languages a
phoneme or two might end up with seemingly really irregular reflexes, like,
I dunno, v <> d. But that would not really be any weirder than, say, the
human concept of "rhotic".

One would of course need to know plenty more [than I do] about acoustic
phonetics in order to plausibly construct such a phenomenon...


> >I have no idea why is there need to differentiate the terms "tap" and
> >"percussive" ... are you insinuating that the latter term was earlier
>used
> >more widely??
>
>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.


> >I think I'll also note that it seems to me that some trills are
>inherently
> >"flapped" (/B\/) and others "tapped" (/r R\/).
>
>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\/.)


>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).
>
>-Bfowol
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.

John Vertical

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