Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

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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