Quoting Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>:
> >>> 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]....
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]!
> 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.
What's "plosivization"? 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 ...
> 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,
Those Haida sounds sound nothing at all like "gl" or "kl" to my ears.
And if these are the "real" lateral affricates, what's one to call [tK] et
sim? It's certainly an affricate, and certainly lateral, 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).
> 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] ...
> 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).
This means trills are plosives?
Andreas