Re: Not phonetic but ___???

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.
           Travis
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.
--- And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
> John C:
> > And Rosta scripsit:
> >
> > > The problem is how to choose which distinctions
> to blur. Consider
> > > THOUGHT, GOAT, FORCE, NORTH, CURE: collapsing
> all 5 into one would
> > > result in too many homographs, but any partial
> collapse into fewer
> > > than 5 is going to run contrary to one accent or
> another.
> >
> > I think that FORCE vs. NORTH is clearly dying out
> in this country,
> > though I don't know the situation in the U.K.
>
> Dialect-levelling continually erodes the areas where
> it survives,
> but in those areas it is still maintained by the
> young.
>
> Amanda:
> > Which way does the distinction run between these
> two?  They sound
> > the same to me.
>
> NORTH opener, FORCE closer. In the UK in places
> where NORTH != FORCE,
> NORTH=THOUGHT and sometimes FORCE=GOAT.
>
> John:
> > I've always been a fan of merging FOOT and GOOSE;
> even though
> > they're distinct in almost all accents, the
> functional load is very
> > low and there are a huge number of
> idiosyncratically pronounced words.
>
> That is a good suggestion. It is not prejudicial to
> any accent, and
> as you say, it blurs distinctions (of lexical
> incidence) between
> accents. If I had more time it would be an
> interesting challenge
> to come up with an equitable dialect-neutral
> orthography for
> English along lines such as these.
>
> BP:
> > > > > Ah.  What about the [l] in PALM?
> > > > No.  Do you actually articulate any [l] there?
> > >In careful speech, yes.  Otherwise, there seems
> to be a sort of
> > >l-coloring (palatalization?) of the vowel,
> analogous to r-coloring.  For
> >
> > That's probably why Wells replaced PALM with
> FATHER in the LPD.
>
> I hadn't noticed that. Strictly speaking, PALM is
> better than FATHER,
> dialectologically, since some accents have TRAP or
> FACE in _father_.
> But FATHER would be more perspicuous to a general
> lay readership.
>
> > There ought to be a keyword CUTE, since this sound
> varies
> > between /ju/ and /iw/, and is arguably a
> diphthong.
>
> That's one of the things Wells deliberately
> overlooks in the lexical
> sets, because it is confined to S. Wales. /iw/ is a
> diphthong, but
> as for /ju/, it would be counterproductive to treat
> it as a diphthong,
> since its behaviour is so much to the contrary.
>
> --And.


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html

Reply