Re: Voiced Velar Fricative

Barry Garcia wrote:
> I borrowed a book through interlibrary loan (from The University of Texas
> at Arlington, BTW) on my grandfather's dialect of Visayan (A Philippine
> Language) called "Aklanon" (Akeanon), and it says that it includes a
> unique sound among the West Visayan Languages, which is the voiced velar
> fricative. It tells how to make the sound, but i just cant seem to do it.
> What other languages have this sound (better yet, where can I hear this
> sound on the web)?
But don't you speak Spanish, Barry? Spanish has this sound, or at least
something very very close to it. For instance, the <g> in <abogado> comes
very close to a voiced velar fricative. Like all the other voiced stops
in Spanish, <g> is lenited in intervocalic position. In some dialects,
they are lenited so much that they are approximants, in others, they are
fricatives. So <abogado> ought to be pronounced [aBoGaDo] (where [B][G][D]
are voiced fricative/approximants). Perhaps its because the sound is an
allophone of <g> that you don't realize that you are able to make that
sound?

-kristian- 8)