Re: Lateral fricatives (was: Names of Latin alphabet letters)

At 5:10 pm -0500 27/1/01, Herman Miller wrote:
>On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 12:24:33 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
>wrote:
>
>>BTW I also find the SAMPA use of [K] to ASCIIfy the IPA belted-l symbol a
>>strange way to denote the voiceless lateral fricative a strange choice.
>>Does anyone know why was [K] chosen.
>
>At least SAMPA _has_ a symbol for the lateral fricatives. That's pretty
>much the only reason I use SAMPA (and even then, I cheat and use [&]
>instead of [{], ['] for ["], and [,] for [%]).
It seems 'modified SAMPA' is what is mostly used on Conlang and similar
lists.  I find SAMPA use of [{] and [}] rather unsatisfactory.

>I need those lateral
>fricatives, and Kirshenbaum's system forces you to hack something together
>by using the <lat> diacritic or one of the ad-hoc symbols.
Absolutely - but then Kirshenbaum IIRC was basically interested in
representing English with ASCIIfied IPA.  But the hacking with tags for
less common sounds is, I agree, unsatisfactory.

>I'd guess the
>SAMPA authors were probably running out of symbols by the time they got to
>[K], and chose it for its appearance rather than sound. (However, "$" seems
>to me to be a better representation of the appearance of the IPA symbol for
>the voiceless lateral fricative than "K".)
I agree.  When I lived in Wales I remember someone telling me that the word
_pwll_ (pit) was like saying 'push' and 'pull' at the same time; and {$}
looks a good deal like {l} and {S} written together!  Tho I'm not sure what
one should choose for the voiced lateral fricative.

>
>Well, since Unicode still looks pretty unlikely for email in the near
>future (and even on the Web isn't very well supported yet), maybe I should
>revive my KPA proposal (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/kpa.html). Hmm, I
>don't really like my representation of the voiced lateral fricative;
I must take another look at it.
------------------------------------------------------------

At 10:52 pm +0000 27/1/01, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>> Date:         Fri, 26 Jan 2001 22:45:20 -0000
>> From: And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
>>
>> Ray:
>> > Even more strange is the pronunciation used by some in England when
>> > attempting to pronounce the Welsh lateral fricative {ll}; they 'hear'
>> > (incorrectly) it as /xl/ and say [kl] !
>>
>> Speaking as an eminent Livagianist, I don't find it at all strange.
>> Livagian /xl/ (<khl>) and /Gl/ (<ghl>) are normally pronounced as
>> voiceless and voiced lateral fricatives.
>
>Compare also the use by the Spanish of tl for similar sounds in South
>American languages.
I'd always understood that {tl} represented an affricate, not a simple
fricative.

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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