Initial /?/ (was: Number)

Jesse Bangs/Yoon Ha Lee et al. wrote:


>> I was trying to figure out how in the heck you would hear a [?]
>> before a vowel <rueful look> since the prof for that class told us
>> that technically when you say a vowel (without something else
>> before
>> it??) there's always a glottal stop, so if you said [qaItSaref] by
>> itself, how would you know?  :-/  The somewhat tentative fix for
>> that
>> was to make {q} [?] between two vowels, [x] otherwise.  <looking
>> around hopefully>
>>
>> YHL
>
>I like the tentative fix myself, but I don't think there's a problem with
>having phonemic initial /?/.  *My* phonetics teacher said that it is
>possible to pronounce a vowel-initial word without a glottal stop, though
>he might have said that no languages actually make use of that
>distinction.  If you want to keep {q} fundamentally a stop, you could
>replace it with something stronger initial positions, like a pharyngeal
>stop.

I suspect there are plenty of languages with /?-/ : /0-/  contrast, provided
they also contrast in other positions.  Tonga, Samoa, Hawaiian to my
knowledge.  It's certainly audible in the flow of speech; in list
pronunciation there might be a tendency, as in English, for automatic
glottal onset.

It would even be possible to have a language where, although glottal onset
is
automatic, when you add a prefix some forms have /?/, others don't; so it
must be there underlyingly.  E.g.  (made up forms)  [?imis] [paka?imis] vs.
[?itun] [pakaitun]