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

>Except that you have the problem of having to compromise somewhere.  If
>you made a separate character for every possible distinction, you'd have
>to have thousands of characters.  :-)  Using "actually distinguished in
>a known language" is a useful compromise.
But the choices made are arbitrary. E.g. the symbol
for Czech r^, which of course transcribes a sound
that is contrasted with [r] in a known language,
was finally dropped. While another symbol, [x\],
which is phonemically superfluous because there's
no known language (at least not that I know of)
that contrasts it with [S], is there on the chart.


>> Why having symbols for the alveolopalatal
>> fricatives at all, is there a language where those
>> contrast with palatalized [S] and [Z]? What about
>> the symbol for simultaneous h and sh, [x\], is
>> there a language where it contrasts with [S]?
>
>It's quite distinct articulatorily from both /S/ and /x/.  It is odd to
>have a special symbol, tho, a tie-bar with /S/ and /x/ would be more
>logical.
But, _phonemically_, it is thought of as of a
kind of "sh". In Swedish, English "sh" is adapted
by means of their "hsh". So a phonemic transcription
as [S] would do perfectly well. The special symbol
only tells you the _articulatory_ (i.e. _phonetic_)
difference.

Besides, Spanish mid e and mid o sound distinctly
different from French open and close e's and o's
(for a Spanish speaker ear, those French vowels
sound as if you merged "ei", "ea", "ou", "oa",
not like our "e" and "o"). Yet so far there's no
IPA symbol for those distinct vowels, featured in
the third most spoken language as well as in others
(somewhere I've seen them symbolized by a small
capital E and small capital omega, which I think
are quite appropriate symbols that would fit very
well in the IPA chart). Another common vowel sound
for which there is no IPA symbol is the central a,
which is the kind of a vowel featured in languages such
as Spanish and Hindi. The IPA symbol [a] stands for
the lowest _front_ vowel and sounds too front for
my Spanish speaker ear, as if it had some amount of
e-quality, so I don't feel really comfortable using
it for our Spanish a (a good symbol for this central
a could be a small capital A).


>But, I fail to see how you can have a "lateral stop" otherwise.
I can record a sample of it for you if you like.
It's an interesting sound to hear.


>If the
>sides of the tongue are raised completely, thus blocking the airstream,
>then what's the difference between that and a regular stop?
Because what causes the lateral stop is not the
raising and lowering of the sides of the tongue,
but the widening and narrowing of the tongue.


>And in a
>stop with lateral release, there *is* central blocking.  If there
>wasn't, it wouldn't be a stop!  Laterals contrast by lateral closure and
>non-laterals by central closure, but how can there be a contrast when
>you have complete closure in both parts?
The difference is in the _sequencing_ of the
closures. In a lateral, the central closure is
kept all the way while the lateral release is
being produced and only when the lateral is
'finished' the central closure is released. In
a central plosive with lateral release, you first
release an amount of air centrally and release
an amount of it laterally. There's also the
possibility of having a simultaneous central
and lateral release.


>In other words
>Lateral approximate: central closure + little or no lateral closure
>Non-lateral approximate: No central closure + lateral closure
>
>Lateral fricative: Central closure + moderate lateral closure
>Non-lateral fricative: Moderate central closure + lateral closure
>
>Lateral stop: Central closure + lateral closure
>Non-lateral stop: Central closure + lateral closure
You have to define also _where_ the release of the
air is produced, centrally or laterally, and this is
what distinguishes the laterals from the other sounds.
In a lateral stop, the central closure is kept while
the lateral release is produced. In a central stop,
the lateral closure is kept while the central release
is produced.


>> Most taps/flaps and trills _are_ plosive, whether
>> they are 'counted' as "plosives" or not. Castilian
>> Spanish -rr- is nothing but a quick succession of
>> alveolar d's, that is, a quick succession of alveolar
>> stops.
>
>I wouldn't call it that!  It's produced completely differently.  -rr- is
>not produced by raising and lowering the tongue in rapid succession, but
>by the airstream causing the tip of the tongue to vibrate.
Not at all that differently. A plosive is defined by the
_plosion_ not by the raising and lowering of the tongue,
which happens in fricatives and approximants too.

There's no way you can lower the whole tongue between
the individual taps in a trill, because they are
pronounced much more quickly than you would literally
have time to perform that movement, so the plosions
in a trill are produced by a vibratory movement of
the tongue rather than a wide raising and lowering.


>A tap would
>make sense to call a very brief stop, altho given that many languages do
>distinguish between taps and stops, it seems logical to distinguish
>them.
But we're mixing two different paramenters here:
Degree of closure (plosive/fricative/approximant)
is _not_ opposed to rhoticity (non-rhotic, tap,
trill) - those are two different articulatory
dimensions. Rhoticity is about "pulseness". If
a plosive is held for long enough, it doesn't feel
like a pulse (thus, non-rhotic), but if you pronounce
it quickly it does (tap-like rhotic), and then you
can have a row of pulses instead of a single one
(trill-like rhotic). Graphically one could express
this opposition this way:

- (non-rhotic)
. (tap-like)
... (trill-like)

If you combine both dimensions, you get plosive
non-rhotics [d], plosive taps [4], plosive trills
[r], a fricative non-rhotics [D], a fricative
taps [4_o], a fricative trills [r_o], an approximant
non-rhotics [D_o], an approximant taps [4_o_o] and
an approximant trills [r_o_o] (*).

(*) I'm deliberately avoiding the symbol [r\] since
it is unclear whether it is supposed to have inherent
rhoticity or not (it's r-like shape seems to suggest
an inherently rhotic, but in the IPA chart it is
placed within a row where all the other members are
not taken to have inherent rhoticity and no explicit
mention as for its rhotic status is made) and because
the symbol for rhoticity doesn't distinguish between
the single-pulse and multiple-pulse kinds, so even
if I used [r\] for the non-rhotic approximant and
[r\`] for the rhotic approximant, I would still
need a way to represent the approximant tap and the
approximant trill separately.


>> English r is
>> usually an apico-postalveolar approximant-flap,
>
>Approximant-flap?  What's that mean?  How can something be both a flap
>and an approximant?
Hunh? Approximant and fricative taps are not rare
in Spanish at all, they are perfectly valid and not
uncommon allophones of /4/. Just don't touch the
alveolar ridge with the tip of your tongue when
pronouncing the tap and you get an apico-alveolar
fricative/approximant tap instead of an apico-alveolar
plosive tap. For an apico-postalveolar instead of
an apico-alveolar, just curl the tip of the tongue
so that it points towards the postalveolar are
instead of towards the alveolar ridge. You do that
all the time when you pronounce English initial r's.
If you don't pronounce them like a flap, that is,
quickly enough to make them look like a pulse, the
sound does no longer feel rhotic and does no longer
sound like an English r, but like a mildly retroflex
y. I can record a sample of all the sounds I've just
described, if you need to hear them with you own
ears to be convinced.

Cheer,
Javier

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