Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

Danny Wier wrote:

non-glottalized uvular stops are very unstable and tend to
>become fricatives.
>
>It is important to aspirated non-ejective voiceless stops and affricates,
by
>the way, in order to further distinguish them from voiced and voiceless
>ejective. Aspiration is partly phonemic in Georgian in fact, because voiced
>stops and affricates tend to be devoiced (but not aspirated) initially and
>finally.
---------
In most colloquial Arabic dialects /q/ has remained a stop, not a
fricative, e.g., Levantine Arabic /?/, Hijazi Arabic /g/ and Iraqi Arabic
has retained /q/.

As to non-ejective Caucasian stops and affricates, Comrie (in "Languages of
the Soviet Union") reports that one or two North Caucasian languages (or at
least some of their dialects) have a four-way distinction in their stops
and affricates:  voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiceless
ejective, and voiced unaspirated.  Additionally, Comrie (or was it
Catford?) reports that many Caucasian languages distinguish "intensive"
(i.e., geminated) forms of voiceless stops and affricates which, in non-
intervocalic environments, are realized as simple unaspirated plosives
(distinguished from their aspirated counterparts).

Also:  Thanks for the Wikipedia link on Ubykh.  Both Ubykh and Abkhaz are
very near and dear to my conlanging heart, as their phonemic inventories
and their verbal morphologies were a strong influence on the design of
Ithkuil.

--John Quijada

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