Re: THEORY: h huffnpuffery (was: RE: varia)

At 13:31 -0700 6.2.2000, Ed Heil wrote:
>
>Yes, voiceless lateral approximants are phonemes in some languages; I
>can't remember which ones but Ladgefoed mentions some; I think Tibetan
>is one of them, so maybe Boudewijn can confirm this for us.
Those Tibetan "lh"s I've heard didn't differ appreciably from the Icelandic
sound, and it is a fact that when I used voiceless lateral approximants in
Icelandic words like "hleypa" Icelanders told me I was pronouncing the
sound too weak.  According to them it "came out as /h/".  I think that sums
up pretty well why phonemic voiceless laterals tend to be fricative.  BTW
the sound written "hr" in Tibetan is actually a voiceless retroflex
sibilant, so /hl/ being fricative makes sense systemically.



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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