Re: Labiovelar stops (Re: Click consonants)

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 21:38:14 -0500, Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
wrote:

>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.
Ladefoged did a lot of work on labiovelars in West African languages
(see "A Phonetic Study of West African Languages" 1968 or Ladefoged &
Maddieson "Sounds of the Worlds' Languages") and records that ingressive
(or implosive) production of labiovelars in some languages, though I can't
recall right now which have it and which don't - I'm pretty sure it
glottalic ingressive production occurs in some varieties of Igbo,
particularly since one dialect, Owerri (?), IIRC has both voiced and
voiceless implosives at labial and alveolar points of articulation.

Bfowol