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Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 14:12
On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:45:40 -0400, ROGER MILLS wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote: >>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]
Not quite. The contrast can be found in a number of Volta-Congo languages, probably most famously Ewe. Wikipedia claims this to exist also in a southern Bantu language going by the name of Venda... John Vertical

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>