Lateral fricatives (was: Describing the Welsh LL to non-linguists)

Paul Roser wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:53:38 +0000, R A Brown
> <ray@...> wrote:
>
>> All the above are alveolar lateral fricatives. Lateral fricatives
>> are also possible in retroflex, palatal and velar positions, altho
>> there are no IPA symbols for these. The Bura language of
>> north-eastern Nigeria has four lateral fricatives: voiced &
>> voiceless alveolar ones, and voiced & voiceless velar ones - but I
>> haven't discovered how they are written.
>
> Ray,
>
> Do you have any reference on velar laterals in Bura?
I found a reference when I was browsing for info about lateral
fricatives generally - now I can't find the darn reference!

> In his book on African phonetics from the 60s Ladefoged described
> Bura as having palatal lateral fricatives, and that is also how
> they're described in the UCLA language materials (and also in L & M's
> Sounds of the Worlds languages) - but I found a pdf dictionary of
> Bura online <www.geocities.com/Athens/6060/Buradictionary.pdf>
Thanks for the URL - I've downloaded the dictionary. According to that
Bura has _six_ lateral fricatives: voiced & voiceless pairs of alveolar,
labio-alveolar & velar. But no mention of palatal lateral fricatives.

There's obviously some difference of opinion here!

> and
> that seems to list the second pair of lateral fricatives as compounds
> of velar fricatives plus the alveolar laterals /xK, GK\/. From the
> dictionary I gather that the alveolar laterals are written <tl, dl>,
> and the velars are written <h, gh>, so the velar/compound laterals
> should be <htl, ghdl>, though there is at least one incidence of
> <tly> in the dictionary, but I'm unclear what it indicates...
Yes, the spelling is not clear, is it? In the introduction to the
dictionary it seems there is not yet a satisfactory system of spelling
that represents all the sounds in the language. There's a reference to
an 'Appendix 5' but I can't find any appendices.

> Besides the other examples of multiple lateral fricatives, Toda in SW
> India has dental/alveolar and retroflex and A-Hmao in also has
> alveolar and retroflex lateral fricatives.
It doesn't surprise me that retroflex lateral fricatives might be found
in one or more languages of India. A distinction between a dental and a
retroflex series of consonants seems common to most Indian languages.


--
Ray
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