Re: Pharyngeal glides (was: Tetraphthongs, Triphthongs, Dipht...)

Quoting John Vertical <johnvertical@...>:

> > > And now for a new sub-topic. Do any languages have overtly pharyngeal
> > > glides? That is, akin to the vocalization of German final /R/ (which
> >could
> > > be seen as a uvular glide), are there languages where there would be
> >reason
> > > to analyze /?\/ rather than non-syllabic /a/ or /A/??
> >
> >Classical Klaish, a conlang of mine, has a phoneme that is realized as [h\]
> >or
> >[?\] and corresponds to /a/ as /j/ to /i/ and /w/ to /u/.
> >
> >It mostly goes to zero in descendant langs, but >[h] initially in Telenian
> >and
> >Searixina.
> >
> >                                          Andreas
>
> Excellent! Do these semivowels also happen act glide-like? ie. can they eg.
> cluster more freely than other consonants, while messing up vowel evolution?
Never thought about it in that way before, but I suppose they count as vowels
for the purposes of consonsant clustering. Classical Klaish doesn't allow more
than two "real" consonants in a row (within the same word), but you do get
things like _kanzjama_, which one then might want to analyze as /kan.zia.ma/.

The sound also turns up to break up hiatic 'aa', eg in _kanzjamahâ_
[kan'zja.ma.?\a:], gentive of the above. The word, incidentally, means "lover,
mistress".

                                         Andreas