speech impediments

John Cowan (May 20):
> Sally Caves wrote:
> >  Same with Teonaht _hman_, "bread," and _hmekivar_, "cleaning
> >  person."
> > Difficult to say with a cold.
>
> IIRC, Livagian has a word you can say which changes how voiceless
> nasals are rendered until you say it again.  This is necessarily for
> people with colds.  (I forget what the alternative rendering is).
That was the situation for a brief while, but the problem subsequently
evaporated when the voiceless nasals were reanalysed as,
phonologically, sequences of voiceless nonsibilant fricative plus
following homorganic nasal. So, for example, /fm/ can be realized by a
voiceless [m] (nareally fricated), or by [f(@)m], /khqx/ by a
voiceless nasalized lateral click or by [x(@)||^N], and so on. When
you have a cold, you just use the viable allophony.

I also considered seeking a solution (similar to my original one for
the voiceless nasal problem) for the loss of higher frequency sound
over telephone lines (esp. [f] v. [s]), but Livagians (cast, as they
are, in my own mould) are confirmed anti-pragmatists -- "fatalistic
idealists" (= "do not accept what should be better, and if you
yourself cannot make it better then have as little to do with it as
possible") -- and rejected any such augmentation to the language, on
the grounds that it is telephones that are at fault and should be
altered, rather than Livagian. So because of their principles they put
up with the sort of impediment to communication that in more
propitious circumstances the Livagian genius would have linguistically
engineered away.

--And.