Re: Glottal Stops and word-initial vowels

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
> frequently found that there are not?
From my limited experience:  Germanic langs. yes, though not necessarily in
English**; Romance langs. no (except for French hache aspirée just
mentioned), they elide their vowels.  Indonesian and most of its relatives
yes, eliding vowels is a no-no.  Hawaiian and some other Oceanic langs. have
contrastive 0 vs ? initial, which IMO must be very hard to hear (the ? in
those cases is < *k).

What say our Russophones and Japanophones???

**Radio announcers do, as in "[dVbl=ju?o?em]".  ?Otherwise ?it sounds ?odd
to ?insert ?it ?on ?every ?initial vowel, no?

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.
>
I do too, but my Kash informant says it makes me sound demanding or overly
emphatic.  They only use [?] phrase or clause-initial (in case of V...V),
otherwise only for emphasis. Otherwise e/i+V inserts a [j], o/u+V a [w];
between two a's, a "voiced h" by preference, or a glottal stop; or elision
if the two words form a syntactic unit.

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