Re: more on my "pharyngeal fricative"

On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:05:31 -0500, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>The sound is either a pharyngeal ejective, or a simultaneous glottal stop
>and voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Sergei Starostin reconstructs at least
>something like this sound for Proto-North Caucasian, and Agul may in fact
>have just that in its inventory. His symbol is a barred glottal stop, which
>of course is IPA for an epiglottal stop.
You might want to check on Nootka and the Salish languages of the Pacific
Northwest, some of which have glottalized pharyngeals. I know there is some
data on the web about them, just can't find the link right now.

IIRC, several of those languages have a glottalized pharyngeal that is
realized as a pharyngealized glottal (or epiglottal) stop. I don't think
that you can actually make a true ejective that far back in the throat
because there's simply not enough distance between the two closures.

>Agul, by the way, has pharyngeal and epiglottals, but no glottals. To have
>all three phoenically appears to violate a linguistic universal, or at
>least seems to be unreasonable. But I was surprised to see both bilabial
>and labiodental fricatives in one African language, according to Ladefoged;
>same goes for voiced lateral fricative AND voiced lateral approximant in
>Zulu.
I don't know about Zulu, but I believe the labial fricatives in Ewe were
historically derived from labialized uvular fricatives, though I can't
remember where I read that...

>Now if you'll excuse me, I'm working out a layout for a 17-tone microtonal
>bandoneon (tango accordion)...
Now that sounds intriguing! I'm a big fan of 17-et.

Bfowol

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