Labiovelar stops (Re: Click consonants)

At 07:01 PM 12/7/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora wrote:
> > Kpelle, spoken in Liberia, has the co-articulated stops that you just
> > described.  They are called labiovelars.  Igbo has these phonemes as
> > well.  I studied Kpelle for two semesters in a Field Methods in
>Linguistics
> > course, and I don't remember the /gb/ being ingressive.
>
>I could be wrong. (As I see I was, upon due consideration, about Paul
>Bennett's k-t "click".)  My impression  was that it's a concommitant of the
>voicing-- you have to release the velum first so that the trapped air is
>"swallowed" and enables the vocal cords to vibrate.  But I've never actually
>heard one produced natively...........
I'd probably have to get my ten year old Field Methods tapes out to be
absolutely certain - and even that is second best to having Clara actually
there in front of me, which isn't going to happen again - but I don't
remember hers being ingressive, and I know that my imitation of her /gb/
was not ingressive.  However, I do remember both the voiced and the
voiceless labiovelar stops having a distinctive "popping" sound to them on
release, when pronounced correctly.  (After nearly ten years, I am having
trouble getting the stop co-articulated accurately, but I don't think that
I used to have this problem.)  That popping sound might be acoustically
confusible with the "twanging" quality that you get with the release of a
voiced ingressive stop.  I just tried it, and I can certainly pronounce an
ingressive one.  I just don't remember Clara's being ingressive, but that
doesn't mean that other languages don't pronounce them with that airstream
mechanism.

Isidora