Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

Herman Miller wrote:
>Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:20:39 -0400
>
>http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/kjaginic-8.png
That's very elegant.  Your later text sample looked vague Hebraic to me.
>
>I still need to figure out how the possible points of articulation can be
>assigned to these shapes. There could be some flexibility depending on
>language, but one possibility would be something like this:
>
>column 1: bilabial, labiodental
>column 2: dental
>column 3: alveolar
>column 4: post-alveolar, retroflex
>column 5: palatal
>column 6: velar
>column 7: uvular, pharyngeal
>column 8: epiglottal, glottal
IIRC Tamil (or at least some Dravidian lang.) has all of 1 thru 6 at least.

I'm reasonably sure that with a Distinctive Feature matrix you could cover
most if not all of these.  I'd like to try, but my Gen.Phon. is getting a
little rusty (and out-dated).  Some feature(s) might have to be a bit ad-hoc
(neither Chomskian nor Jakobson-Halle) but that's permitted :-))  For ex. I
introduced "retroflexed" in Gwr, to distinguish /l/ and /r/-- there are
other ways, but that worked best in Gwr phonology.

At least one of the tenets of J-H is that certain contrasts at the same POA
have not been observed in _human_ languages (so yours could differ), e.g. no
language contrasts bilabial [phi] vs. labiodental [f] --but one of my
Indonesian favorites does have /B/ vs. /w/-- the main way around that is to
distinguish them by major class features ([+C -V] for /B/ vs. [-C -V] for
/w/; note that resonants (nasals and liquids, which can be syllabic) are [+C
+V]; another would be to say /B/ = underlying //v//, with bilabiality
specified by redundancy, or by a late phonetic rule; yet another (Chomsky
IIRC) is to introduce the major class feature [+Obstruent] for the "true
consonants", leaving glottals et al. as [-Obs].

IIRC /b/ and /f/ usually share all major features, except /f/ of course is
[-stop] with labiodentality (and perhaps [+strident]), assigned by
redundancy rule.

Velars and uvulars generally share all features, esp. [+back], but are
distinguished by [+high] (body of the tongue is raised) for velars, while
uvulars are [-high].  Don't know about pharyngeals-- that might involve
"retracted [tongue root]" ???

(Probably telling you things you already know :-))) )