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Re: Voiced Velar Fricative

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Saturday, December 21, 2002, 20:09
Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> Thomas Wier wrote: > >Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>: > > > > > I think modern Greek has it too, but I'm not completely > > > sure about that. If you have for instance a language where > > > all fricatives have both a voiceless and voiced counterpart > > > and you have /x/, you can safely add /G/ > > > >I think in modern Greek, [G] is an allophone, along with [x], > >of /x/. > > Isn't gamma [G] before back vowels these days?
As John pointed out, I was wrong above. Peter Ladefoged's page shows why: <http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/appendix/languages/greek/greek.html> You'll note that /xOma/ 'soil' contrasts with /GOma/ 'eraser', so presumably the orthographic gamma does precede backvowels, although I can't attest to its distribution generally. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637