Re: laterals (was: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia)

On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at 04:40 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>:
[snip]
>>> When I try to do a plosive in the same position as [tK], it sounds
>>> absolutely nothing like [tK]....
>
> Hold on a moment there - [t] and [K] belong in the IPA's
> dental/alveolar/postalveolar column. The stop corresponding to [tK] ought
> to
> be simply [t]!
That's right. But dental/alveolar/postalveolar refers to positions of the
tongue tip. What I assumed Joe meant, and certainly I tried, was to hold
the rest of my tongue in exactly the same position as I do when I
pronounce [K] while making a closure with the tip of my tongue & releasing
it without any friction.

[snip]
>> But unfortunately the current IPA chart doesn't provide
>> any specific symbol for the actual sound, neither for
>> the affricate itself (even though there already exists
>> a symbol -crossed lambda- in use among linguists
>> dealing with Native American languages) nor for the
>> plosive part;
Eh? My IPA chart has a symbol for both a voiceless and voiced lateral
fricative. The voiceless lateral fricative is common enough in Welsh and I
can pronounce it readily enough. It occurs also in Zulu, Xhosa & other
Nguni languages. I have heard the sound used by these speakers when I've
visted South Africa. The Nguni languages also possess the voiced lateral
fricative.  In my copy of the IPA chart, as I've said, there are symbols
for both affricates.

>> nor does it provide any diacritic for
>> 'plosivization' or 'lateralization' either. Another
>> pair of flaws to add to the heap.
>
> What's "plosivization"?
Yes, indeed.  What is it?
> No-one's explained a lateral stop either, I might
> point out. Since lateral wrt affricates and fricatives is orthogonal to
> POA,
> it seems odd that a lateral stop couldn't be dental or alveolar ...
It does indeed. In fact, as far I can understand Javier, the 'lateral
plosives' occurs _only_ at the onset of the [tK] and [dK\] affricates.
This, in my book, would make them at best _conditioned variants_ of [t]
and [d] respectively.

>> Listen to how actual lateral affricates sound from
>> native speakers of languages where those sounds
>> are commonplace, e.g. Haida:
I shall.

[snip]
> And if these are the "real" lateral affricates, what's one to call [tK] et
> sim? It's certainly an affricate, and certainly lateral,
It certainly is both.

> if lateral is defined
> as having the airstream going at the sides of the tongue (which is the
> only
> definition of lateral in the context of articulatory phonetics I've heard)
> .
Correct. Whether the airstream passes each side or just one one side to
vary with speakers and to make have perceptible.

>> because
>> they're actually neither of those clusters with which
>> Westerners may poorly try to imitate them, but something
>> that somehow seems to be in-between (because the plosion
>> of the initial lateral stop is produced at the side(s)
>> of the tongue in the area that lies between the front
>> and the back of the mouth).
>
> Assuming plosion refers to the breaking of closure with attendant
> production
> of a short burst of sound, this sounds like what you get in [tK] ...
Yep.

[snip]

>> _"normal" l_. Sorry, that was an error of mine, because
>> the normal laterals (I mean, the usual ones) are of
>> course the approximant ones; unlike the normal rhotics
>> which are plosive (English approximant r and Czech
>> fricative r^ are idiosyncratic, not the usual kind
>> of rhotic to be found cross-linguistically).
I'm aware that the American and southern British /r/ and the Czech r-hacek
are not usual cross linguistically. But, like Andreas, I was under the
impression that the 'archetypal' /r/ was trilled (as in Welsh & 'Welsh
English', Scots English and Italian).

> This means trills are plosives?
Nope - there's no plosion with a 'real' /r/.

The only sounds I understand by the term 'rhotic plosive' are the
retroflex plosives, common in the languages of India (and, I believe, also
found in Swedish  :)

Ray.
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