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

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Isaac Penzev wrote:

> Tristan McLeay eskribiw:
>
> > All I can find in Russian is some music by Zemfira (so this
> mightn't be
> > indicative of spoken R.);
>
> Pretty good, quite normal Russian. An Aussie listens to Zemfira?
> Kinda cool!...
Heh :) I have to blame an American conlanger (specifically the guy who
hosts my email/webpage) for it :) Dunno how he came upon it, though.

> > Does Russian have a length distinction?
>
> No. Even dynamic stress causes very little lengthening. Only heavy
> reduction of unstressed vowels: /o/, /a/ > [V], [@] or even [@_x]
> etc.
Okay. Russians seem more able to arbitrarily lengthen vowels when singing
than Australians, then :)

> > I would describe front [a] as having some [&]-like quality (but I
> guess
> > that's my English speaking)
>
> If that's about Russian, then /a/ indeed has [&] as an allophone
> between two palatalized consonants: /p;at;/ [p;&t;] 'five'. (;
> stands for _j here). But main variant is definitely central.
No-no, I meant the [a] in the various recordings. But yes, I did notice
the fronted allophone, though I hadn't noticed where it was.

> ObConlang: In Rumean, I'm still trying to figure out how five
> Spanish vowels would map onto six Arabic ones. I need to preserve
> /a/ ~ /a:/ opposition in Arabic loans since it is important for
> positioning word stress, so it look like I'll need to split Spanish
> /a/ into two sounds depending on stress. This may end with [&] ~ [A]
> system like in Farsi...
Some English borrowings look like that from my pespective... Some words
borrowed with an [a] have the [a] become /a:/ if it's got the primary
stress by the English rules and either /&/ or /a/ if it's not. (And then
the stress gets sometimes gets moved to the first syllable and you can't
tell that rule anymore.) Totally useless and needlessly complex from my
perspective but probably extremely simple from others, and it tends to
only happen with place names/common words; proper names of non-famous
people are always borrowed much simplerly :)

--
Tristan.