Re: Proposed phonology for my new language

Concerning the pronunciation of two infamous Semitic/Arabic consonants...

>An Arabic textbook I looked at put it frankly:
>"[`ayn] sounds like being sick.  [Haa] is its voiceless counterpart." :-)
Huh, never thought of it that way.  (And I happen to be sick with the
hayfever now.  Ragweed blooming everywhere.)  I made myself practice these
consonants a lot when I started to *attempt* to teach myself Hebrew and
Arabic.  The barred-h (voiceless) to me is easier, because it sounds and
"feels" like a real consonant.  I tighten the top of my throat (the
approximate location of the pharynx; the glottis is lower), and I use the
root of my tongue to do so, along with some muscles back there only God
knows about.  It takes a little finesse, so as not to accidentally produce
the *uvular* fricative, i.e. Arabic _khaa'_; likewise _ghayn_ for the voiced
consonant.

Now the voiced consonant _`ayn_: even though it's simply the voiced version
of _Haa'_; it doesn't quite feel like a consonant.  It makes me think of
some sort of vocal trick.  Personally it sounds like a very dark, very
guttural English "r", with a little bit of "gargling" involved.  It's
clearly one of the most difficult sounds to produce in language (other than
that _r-hac^ek_ in Czech which is mentioned in the Guinness Book of World
Records as the most difficult consonant to learn -- why no reference to
Arabic _3ayn_ is beyond me).

Now you wanna know some REAL tough consonants, try the North Caucasian
languages, especially Abxaz, Adyghe, and especially the now-extinct Ubyx.
I've seen Sergei Starostin's homepage (http://starling.rinet.ru), and he
posits six -- that's right, SIX -- laryngeal-range consonants for
Proto-North Caucasian (and yes, I had to go ahead and include them in Tech
phonology), to wit:

      Stop  Fr-V  Fr+V
Glot  ?     h     H   (H = voiced "h")
Phar  ?-    h-    `   (?- = barred glottal stop;
                       I guess that's an epiglottal? affricate)

And we thought Arabic was a challenge!

Danny

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