Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: G'amah phonology

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Sunday, February 20, 2000, 14:20
Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>>FFlores wrote: >[...] >>> <h> is /H/ (uvcd pharyngeal fric), with allophones >>> [x] after /i/ >>> [H] otherwise >>Intuitively, [x] after /i/ as an allophone of /H/ seems rather unlikely >>to me. >Yes, I don't know why /H/ has this allophone. [Ix] certainly occurs in >Welsh, so I guess [ix] also occurs in natlangs. But if [i] triggers >allophones, it's generally a palatalizing effect. I'd have expected German >ich-laut [C] after [i] rather than ach-laut [x].
I was toying with the idea, yes, and it could certainly be a free variation. But palatalization (seen as assimilation) is not in the spirit of the language so far; /i/ would just front /H/ a bit (and it could well be to the uvular, not velar POA). To me it's actually difficult to pronounce [ix] instead of [iC].
>>> <ll> is [Z<lat>] (much like Welsh <ll>, but rather palatal) >> >>Do you mean that it is a palatal lateral fricative? Quite interesting! > >Yes, a sound I make with ease. I once intended to use it in a now-dormant >conlang of mine and was subsequently reliably informed that the sound >occurs in Icelandic.
Oh, I didn't know that! Yes, it's palatal, or at least noticeably more back than /l/. And on a higher level of abstraction, it belongs with the "palatals", which are rather irregular: <ch>, <j>, <sh> and <zh> are phonetically postalveolar; <ch'> is more palatal, and <j'> is a palatal stop, not an affricate.
>>> all as in IPA. /o/ sometimes alternates with [@_O]. >>Voiceless schwa? >Ah, the zero vowel :)
Oh no! Well, I took my ASCII IPA chart and [@_O] is supposed to be a "more rounded" schwa. ("O" is letter "O", not number zero). As I haven't worked on the ancestor language, I don't know what has happened to the vowels throughout history. I know there's a reason why /o/ gets centered, and I think there was a central high /i-/ at some point, which could explain some puzzling alternancies (like [H] > [x] sometimes, and /H/ > /S/ some other times). --Pablo Flores http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/draseleq.html