Re: Glottal Stops and word-initial vowels

Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Daniel D Hicken wrote:
>
> > Is it a given that word initial vowels cause humans to use a glottal
stop
> > such as in /?{p@l/ apple, or /?{lo/ French 'Allo'  Or is it more
>
> You'll find that it's /alo/, I do believe. And /&p@l/, for that matter;
> the [?] is non-phonemic (so [?&p@l] is correct, though).
>
> > frequently found that there are not?  I'm working on a conlang, and when
> > I go through and pronounce through the words, I find that I'm wanting to
> > put a glottal stop in front of the word-intial vowels when there's no
> > liaison from the preceding word.
> >
> > Comments?
>
> It's my understanding that since [?] became widespread in some British
> dialects, words beginning with vowels now begin with vowels :) But this
> information is at least second-hand. I'm capable of doing what sounds like
> starting with no consonant, though. (but this might just be a sound I
> don't recognise: a voiced [h], perhaps, or some nature of glide.)
>
Why not a voiced [h] ([h_v]? I read in a book (I don't remember which one -
perhaps a book by Daniel Jones, but I'm not sure) that the phoneme /h/ can
be considered as an unvoiced vowel and then [ha] = [a_0a], [hi] = [i_0i],
etc. What do you think?

Jean-François Colson
jfcolson@belgacom.net