En réponse à Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> ..and so also was I flabbergasted. I can assure Christophe that not
> all
> anglophones call voiced sounds "harder".
>
Hehe, I'm happy to see that there are still some sensible people in
Angloworld :))) .
>
> Maybe. But as American English seems to voice all intervocalic
> plosives,
> one would assume that such voicing was because the sounds are easier
> or "softer".
>
I'd think that too. Cf. my mail explaining that soft can also refer to the
easiness to fit in the spoken stream (and I can't believe that any English
speaker would not associate soft with easy and hard with difficult).
>
> {ll} btw is *not* by a devoiced (or aspirated) approximate (like the /l/
> in
> English "play". It is a voiceless lateral _fricative_ denoted in
> X-SAMPA
> by [K]. The sound also occurs in the Nguni branch of the Bantulangs
> in
> southern Africa and in some of the indigenous langs of the New World.
> The voiced equivalent also occurs in the Nguni langs and is quite a
> different sound from [l].
>
Indeed! It sounds more like a [Z] with the tongue thrown in (and I have
difficulties pronouncing it without dirtying my computer monitor ;))) ).
Incidentally I have both lateral fricatives in Maggel (as well as alveolar,
palatal and velar lateral approximants :)) ). For instance the adjective
|bltafj| [bK\Ev]: weird (not the simplest word to pronounce, but I like its
ugliness :)) . It gives it character ;)))) ). And there's also |ibolteadg|
[poUK]: bushes (or how a monosyllabic word can look dissylabic simply because
the ending -eadg is silent :))) ).
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.