Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World

En réponse à Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:

> I picked up _Languages of the World_ by Kenneth Katzner a few weeks
> ago.
> It's an interesting, *very* breezy survey of world languages, probably
> not
> really useful linguistically (the author works for the U.S. federal
> gov't)
> .  In particular, I wish his phonological descriptions (which are very
> anglocentric, perhaps not surprisingly) had used IPA instead of fuzzy
> things like "There is both a soft r and a hard r" in Basque.  Which
> brings
> me to my question: for those who know (something about) Basque, what
> the
> heck is he talking about?  Trilled and non-trilled?  Trilled vs.
> approximant?  Meep?
Alveolar trill vs. flap (and I suppose the "hard r" was the trill :)) ).
Basically the same as Spanish, except that Basque seems to contrast them also
in other positions than medial.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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