Re: That pesky H again (was: varia)

At 20:27 +0100 4.2.2000, Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>At 11:30 am -0700 4/2/00, Ed Heil wrote:
>>BP Jonsson wrote:
>[...]
>>> No no.  The problem with [h] is that it meets one of the criteria of
>>> approximants: **lack of oral friction**.
>>
>>This kind of negative and vague "criterion" makes no sense.  One
>>might as well and as usefully say that [h] meets one of the criteria
>>for clicks, which is that it is not produced by oral articulation of a
>>pulmonic egressive airstream, or that [h] meets one of the criteria
>>for labial stops, which is that it is neither a velar or an alveolar
>>stop.
>
>I agree - it kind of makes [h] fit all sorts of categories!
Please read both my posts carefully!  *I* never claimed that lack of oral
friction makes [h] an approximant, just that this articulatory fact
confuses some people.  There is little doubt that *phonetically* [h]
involves friction.  The problem lies in the domain of *phonology*: the fact
that all glottals lack oral obstruction makes it hard to pidgeon-hole them
together with any one category of oral articulations, so that in individual
languages /h/ and /?/ -- note that I use /slashes/ rather than [brackets]
here! -- may pattern into different phonological categories, often for
historical reasons.  If Ray or Aristoteles of Byzantion feel that /h/ is a
prosody in Greek that's OK with me, even if a segmental explanation is
possible too.

IMHO [h] can also be regarded as one of several glottal configurations with
which any oral configuration can be combined to articulate sound.  Thus
corresponding to e.g. [t th d] with dentalveolar closure we get [<silence>
h @] without any oral obstruction.

Let's agree that glottals partly defy categorizations that seem
straightforward for orally articulated sounds.  I just tried to point out a
number of the reasons why it is so.



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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