Re: Tallefkeul: tones and whatnot

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>  And the Tairezans find [m] unpronounceable except
> > when
> > initial or followed by /p/ or /b/. The Yargish cheat by being
> > physically
> > unable to produce [m].
> >
>
>Hehe, the Itakians only have one nasal, /n/ and one liquid /r/ (no
>lateral).
>The result is that their nasal can be of any position, and assimilates very
>easily ;)) .
Tairezazh is somewhat more weird in regard to nasals; there's minimal pairs
for initial n- and m- (eg _nek_ "spaceport" and _mek_ "yellow"), but in all
other positions there's only one nasal phoneme, the pronunciation of which
depends on the surrounding sounds - the "neutral" allophone, found between
to vowels, is dental. To increase confusion, all non-initial nasals are
spelt |n|, even in inflected forms; _tshenek_ means "most yellow",
f'rinstance.

>
>And what about the Sky People, who have only one fricative /s/, which can
>be
>realised as [s], [z], [S] or [Z] ;)))) .
Isn't that the same state of affairs as in LANKA?

>Still, for the speakers of Maggel the cluster [fR_0] is stable ;))) . They
>are
>used to more complicated clusters too. What about the opposite of |a fre|:
>first: |a mile| [@ mbreId]: last ;)))))
One day or another, I'm going to understand how [mbr] is easier to pronounce
than [mr]. And slightly later, I'm going to start pronouncing the "p" in
words like "tempt".

                                            Andreas

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