Re: New Conlang

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 20:00:16 +0300, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

>>Taps/flaps are ballistic movements and by definition can only have one
>>contact. Trills, on the other hand, are caused by the Bernouilli effect,
>>so strictly speaking a trill is not the same thing as multiple taps or
>>a "prolonged" or geminate tap.
>
>"Ballistic" movements?
A term I've come across in the literature - best definition I could find
online: "relating to or characteristic of the motion of objects moving
under their own momentum and the force of gravity" -- which pretty much
describes the articulation of a tap/flap.

>And you really mean it would be possible to differentiate not just
>taps/percussives vs. flaps, but also single-contact trills?? I'm unable
>to produce this last distinction.
Articulatorily it would be possible to distinguish taps/flaps fromsingle-
contact trills, though I doubt the listener would be able to hear any
discernable difference between an alveolar tap and a single-contact
alveolar trill.

The term percussive is now reserved for a small set of phones, mostly found
in disordered speech, though the sublingual percussive occurs in some
productions of the alveolar click (actually realized in this case as a
double click - after the tongue tip releases from contact with the alveolar
ridge the underside of the tongue makes contact with the floor of the
mouth).

>Furthermore, what's the common category for all these sounds?
There's a lot of disagreement on what to call them - 'rhotic' covers most
of them, but excludes the bilabial trill and may or may not exclude the
uvular trill. A *very* old term that I thought nicely covered taps, flaps &
trills was 'vibrant', but it doesn't seem to be used much in the literature
now.

>Here's a rather weird idea: how about denoting numeral n by a trill with n
>contacts? Another trill phoneme could be used for reciprocals, and maybe
>even a third for square roots ... :D
Weird indeed, but interesting, though I doubt humans would have the aural
acuity to distinguish numbers by the number of contacts in trills, but that
doesn't mean it couldn't work in a non-human language.

Bfowol