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

>>> It did occur to me after writing the email that the |tl| in Nahuatl
>>> might
>>> denote this 'lateral
>>> plosive'. I'd always understood it to be a lateral affricate, i.e.
>>> [tK].
>>> But then I recalled that
>>> we anglophones readily substitute a palatal affricate [tS] for the
>>> palatal
>>>  plosive [c] in languages
>>> like Malay /Indonesian. Am I guilty of the same 'slackness' with
>>> regard to
>>> Nahuatl's |tl|?
>>
>> I don't think so. All modern Nahuatl dialects have /tK/ for this
>> affricate, so it seems most likely that the classical language (ca 1520
>> AD) had this sound as well.
>
>When I try to do a plosive in the same position as [tK], it sounds
>absolutely nothing like [tK]....
The sound of those languages transcribed as [tK] is
an affricate, not a stop. But in that sound there's
no [t] at all. The sound you've got there at the
beginning of the affricate is precisely a lateral
stop and not any kind of dental or alveolar plosive.
The transcription [tK] is a) inaccurate, b) misleading.
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; nor does it provide any diacritic for
'plosivization' or 'lateralization' either. Another
pair of flaws to add to the heap.

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

"The sounds of Haida"
http://www.haidalanguage.org/sounds-of-haida.html

(pay attention to how they pronounce the first
consonant in "dlámaal", "tláal" and "tl'ak'")

Those sounds of real lateral affricates look kind
of like a weird mixture of tl/dl with kl/gl, 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).

If you isolate the first element of the affricate you
get a lateral stop: [<whatever symbol the powers that
be finally decide on whenever they finally see fit to
make a way to represent this sound available>]. Which
sounds kind of like a "pressed" l or weird "ld". In
my other message the other day I labelled this as
_"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).

Cheers,
Javier

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