Re: replies to padraic brown and danny wier

In a message dated 7/6/01 11:20:25 PM, dawier@YAHOO.COM writes:

<< |     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/).>>

    Well, gamma is, of course, the velar, but chi (if I'm thinking of the
right one) is a voiceless, uvular fricative which I'm sure Arabic doesn't
have (meaning, I've never heard a native speaker use it, and I was never
taught by any teacher to use anything other than a voiceless, velar
fricative).


<<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/.

 >>

    I haven't taken a straight phonology class yet (that's next semester),
but in all the data I've seen in other Linguistics classes for Arabic (this
being aside from the Arabic classes I've taken), khaa and ghayn are both
velar.  Anyone else heard anything?

-David