Re: Not phonetic but ___???

From: "william drewery" <will65610@...>

> Hey, does anyone know of a language that contrasts a
> pharyngealized glottal stop with a glottalized
> pharyngeal stop? This may sound like hair splitting,
> but /ts/ is not the same as /st/. I ran into this
> natlang called Ubykh at Wikipedia.com, and it has a
> series of ejectives contrasted with pharyngealized
> ejectives, but only one realization of the phonemic
> glottal stop.
The Salishan language Lilloolet (Stl'atl'imxec) has a "glottalized voiced
pharyngeal", and the same thing labiovelarized. Is that close enough?

> P. S. Does it strike anyone that Klingon is really
> pretty wimpy compared to how "harsh" some natlangs
> are? And it's pretty poor as a compounding language,
> as well.
I never really bothered to learn Klingon, except the /qX/ phoneme did pique
my interest (so I have possible dialectal variants of Tech /X/: [qX)] and
[q_h]). It seems like a generic agglutinative language to me, with the
distinctive feature of its object-verb-subject word order. And it's far from
being polysynthetic.

And you got a point. Klingon does have four uvulars and one lateral
affricate, but no ejectives, and none of the kind of consonant clusters and
labialized consonants not followed by vowels, all found in Tamazight, Berber
and Salish. It's no more harsh-sounding than Inuktitut or Welsh.

Reply