Re: replies to padraic brown and danny wier

From: "David Peterson" <DigitalScream@...>

|     Arabic does have a voiceless, uvular plosive, but nothing else.  That
| letter "ghayn" is a voiced, velar fricative.  Counterpart with "ayn" (voiced
| phyryngeal fricative), and then with the pair "Haa" (voiceless phyryngeal
| fricative) and "khaa" (voiceless velar fricative).  What's the Dutch G sound
| like?  Is it a voiced uvular plosive?  Voiced velar fricative?

I read that the Arabic fricatives _khaa_  and _ghayn_  were uvulars, but others
say velar.  The symbols used are the Greek letters chi and gamma, which probably
doesn't intend to reflect actual IPA values.  There is a noticeable difference
if you have a well-trained ear, even though languages that distinguish /x/ from
/X/ and /G/ from /R/ are rare.  Probably found only in North Caucasian, Salishan
and *maybe* an older stage of Hebrew and Syriac (where intervocalic stops become
fricatives, but before Hebrew lenis kaph and cheth merged into a single phoneme
/x/).

I'm leaning towards uvular since every time I've heard Arabic spoken, I want to
interpret the ghayn sound as an R (of course the type used in French and
German).  The velar fricative, i.e. Irish Dh/Gh, doesn't have that "faux rhotic"
quality and is a good bit softer.

The Dutch G apparently went through a shift of /g/ > /G/ > /x/, that is,
spirantization then devocalization.  Like what happened with Spanish where J is
pronounced /x/.

~DaW~


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