Re: Describing the Welsh LL to non-linguists

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:53:38 +0000, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:

>All the above are alveolar lateral fricatives. Lateral fricatives are
>also possible in retroflex, palatal and velar positions, altho there are
>no IPA symbols for these. The Bura language of north-eastern Nigeria has
>four lateral fricatives: voiced & voiceless alveolar ones, and voiced &
>voiceless velar ones - but I haven't discovered how they are written.
Ray,

Do you have any reference on velar laterals in Bura?

In his book on African phonetics from the 60s Ladefoged described Bura as
having palatal lateral fricatives, and that is also how they're described in
the UCLA language materials (and also in L & M's Sounds of the Worlds
languages) - but I found a pdf dictionary of Bura online
<www.geocities.com/Athens/6060/Buradictionary.pdf>
and that seems to list the second pair of lateral fricatives as compounds of
velar fricatives plus the alveolar laterals /xK, GK\/. From the dictionary I
gather that the alveolar laterals are written <tl, dl>, and the velars are
written <h, gh>, so the velar/compound laterals should be <htl, ghdl>,
though there is at least one incidence of <tly> in the dictionary, but I'm
unclear what it indicates...

Besides the other examples of multiple lateral fricatives, Toda in SW India
has dental/alveolar and retroflex and A-Hmao in also has alveolar and
retroflex lateral fricatives.

-Bfowol

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