Re: Voiced Velar Fricative

> Is gh (i don't know the ascii ways of representing IPA sounds, but I
> mean a voiced velar fricative) common? I think english used to have the
> sound, as did welsh (or at least g used to be mutated to gh a long time
> ago) but for some reason it disappeared. I just wondered because I love
> the sound for some reason but I don't want to add it if its extremely
> uncommon in natural languages. Thanks in advance,
A lot of other list members replied to this, and I'll add Farsi and most
Iranian languages, as well as Persian loans into Hindi-Urdu and other North
Indian languages. In fact, in Farsi, the phoneme is very common, as Arabic
qaaf is realized as /G/ rather than /q/, just like ghayn (not so in Urdu).
Farsi seems to have a lot of /S/, /x/ and /G/. But I don't know if the /G/
(and its voiceless counterpart) are really uvular, rather than velar. Few
languages have both /G/ and /R/ -- Inuktitut and certain North Caucasian
languages being examples.

Conlangs with /G/? Black Speech and Klingon are the two I'm aware of....

~Danny~

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