Re: Them durned pharyngeal fricatives

I don't think that the tongue-tenseness of /H/ and /3/ (as i write them)
are not essential features of them - if i've been noticing correctly in
Arabic class, the Arabic emphatics - which it pronounces pharyngealized -
draw vowels down and backwards towards the throat; for instance, (one of
my favorite words in Arabic, the cognate of the Hebrew word _tzevi_)
/D'abi:/ is pronounced [D'Abi:] (with /'/ = emphatic, ['] =
pharyngealization), while if you replace emphatic /D'/ with non-emphatic
/D/, it would be pronounced [D&bi:].  However, /H/ and /3/ do not
transform /a/ into [A]; although i think that they do make it realize
itself as [a], a little more back than [&].

In Hebrew, /H/ and /3/ 'attract' the vowel /a/.  When a word ends with
any 'big' vowel besides [A] followed by /H/ or /3/, an [a] is inserted
before the pharyngeal - for instance, /ru:H/ is pronounced [ru:aH],
/liSmo3/ is pronounced [liSmoa3], etc.  The same thing seems to happen on
a smaller scale in Arabic, but the Arabic writing system doesn't enshrine
it in print like the Hebrew system does.  Also, /H/ and /3/, as gutturals
in the series / ? h H r 3 /, don't like schwas - many times a schwa will
be transformed in their vecinity to an ultrashort vowel of / O a E /
depending on the surrounded environment and in some cases the vowel which
was reduced to the schwa in the first place.
However, in the beginning of a word, they can have any vowel (limited by
the word-structure, of course) - even high front vowels, as in [HiddO]
"riddle" or [3iBri:m] "Hebrews".

So, i think that you may be pharyngealizing the pharyngeals, creating the
fricative stream farther down in your throat than needed.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "yo llamo a las llamas con hierbas llenas de lluvia."


On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:08:21 +0000 Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> writes:
> Designing my lang, I am thinking about keeping voiced and unvoiced
> pharyngeal fricatives (/X\/ & /?\/) in the mature language (they
> occur
> in the protolang anyway), but I'm also trying to evaluate their
> effect
> on the phonemic system. As far as I know, and comparing with
> recordings
> of Haa' and :ayn in Arabic, I'm pronouning them correctly, but I
> have
> the problem (or feature) than my tongue is very tense while saying
> them,
> and held in a back position, so that combinations like /X\A/ and
> /X\O/
> are much easier than say /X\i/. Yet at the same time, I can't see
> why my
> tongue need be like this since the sounds are made by a constriction
> of
> the pharynx - unless that's done partly with the tongue.
>
> So the question is: is the tongue tensing during these sounds a
> necessary feature of them, or is it an artifact of however I taught
> (or
> brutalised, connived or cajoled) my vocal tract to make them?
>
> I suspect the former, since Ha and `ayin in Ancient Hebrew were
> reportedly these sounds, and there are some special rules for these
> letters - e.g. a schwa (in AH not necessarily a /@/) following
> these
> letters has to be 'about half a real vowel' in length, and there
> are some cases where these letters prefer that the quality of this
> half-schwa is that of the vowel /a/ or /A/ I think.
>
> So, am I right or am I right? ;)
>
> Seriously, writing this letter I feel like I've convinced myself,
> but
> maybe someone else can reassure or disabuse me of the notion?
>
> Stephen
>