Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

On Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:41:57 -0400, Herman Miller wrote:
>I guess all three of pharyngeal, epiglottal, and glottal could share
>column 8, since I'm not likely to contrast these. Post-alveolar and
>retroflex are sharing column 4 since these are allophones in Tirelat.
>The main concern is that some Tirelat dialects have 5 contrasting POA
>for fricatives: labiodental, dental, alveolar, post-alveolar (or
>retroflex), and velar (or palatal). Since Kjaginic doesn't have forms
>for affricates, I'm using the symbols for stops; some dialects have
>bilabial stops, dental stops, alveolar affricates, retroflex affricates,
>and velar stops. On the other hand, the languages I'm concerned with
>rarely have palatal/velar contrasts. So something like this might be an
>alternative assignment:
>
>column 1: bilabial
>column 2: labiodental
>column 3: dental
>column 4: alveolar
>column 5: post-alveolar, retroflex
>column 6: palatal, velar
>column 7: uvular
>column 8: pharyngeal, epiglottal, glottal
>
>The problem with this is that bilabial vs. labiodental contrasts are
>unlikely to be needed. Besides, there is a Tirelat dialect that
>contrasts labial-palatal, palatal, and labial-velar approximants /H j
>w/, which could be approximated with the bilabial, palatal and velar
>symbols.
>
>Combining the dentals and alveolars in column 2 would leave a column for
>pharyngeal + epiglottal separate from the others.
>
>But it's more likely that I'll need a dental/alveolar contrast than a
>three-way palatal/velar/uvular set. And there's also linguolabial to
>consider. So maybe something like this, where velar can go in column 5
>or 6 depending on whether a palatal/velar or velar/uvular contrast is
>needed, and dental sounds can go into either column 2 or 3.
>
>column 1: bilabial, labiodental
>column 2: linguolabial, dental
>column 3: dental, alveolar
>column 4: post-alveolar, retroflex
>column 5: palatal, velar
>column 6: velar, uvular
>column 7: pharyngeal, epiglottal
>column 8: glottal
Are there any linguolabials to actually consider, or just in theory?

At any rate, if you want to make it maximally systematic, you could look to
use the inherent 4x2 structure rather than assigning POAs in simple order.
Something like pairing things by stridency:
(labial) 1 - bilabial, 2 - labiodental
(coronal) 3 - plain dental/alveolar, 4 - sibilant dental/alveolar
(dorsal) 5 - palatal/velar, 6 - sibilant postalveolar/uvular
(laryngeal) 7 - glottal, 8 - pharyngeal/epiglottal

It won't work if you have a velar/palatal contrast, tho, and while tS =
"emphatic" c and q = "emphatic" k individually make sense, pairing the two
looks a little weird. Still, that's how I would probably do it…

John Vertical

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