Re: Betreft: Re: Initial clusters, was: Re: Russian orthography

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> >Bella Coola
> >qqs  'eye'
IIRC the only vowel in Bella Coola is a voiceless schwa, so at
the *phonological* level it's all consonants.  At the auditory
level, it all sounds like whispering.

>         Indeed. When I tried them, I got the impression of singing with my mouth
> closed. How can people understand a bit of it? :)
American English uses [m?m] to mean "no" and [mhm] to mean "yes"
(other variants are [?@?@] and [?@h@]),
so these words are not utterly alien to me.

--

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