[h] approximations (was: /s/ -> /h/ )

At 2:40 pm -0700 28/1/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
[snip]
>
>Yes. I should have been more precise. As Rob pointed out, /h/ in
>Dutch and German is voiced, and in English intervocalically. The
>difference is that the voiced /h/ is a different kind of segment
>from an /h/--
[snip]
>
>Try this at home. Produce a nice crisp /s/ and sustain it:
>[ssssss...]. Now, release the alveolar constriction *without
>changing anything else*. The result will be a sustained /h/. Now
>try it with /z/; the result will be a vowel, not a voiced /h/.
>
>> Indeed, when *s becomes *z and then something else, it seems to usually
>> become r, as in Latin and some of the Germanic languages.
>
>Yes; not a voiced /h/, as one might expect if a voiced /h/ were
>merely the voiced counterpart of /h/.
Yep - I'm wondering if the so-called voiced glottal fricative ([h\] in
SAMPA Notation, IPA 'hooktop h') is not, indeed, better described as a
glottal approximant.
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At 10:34 pm -0500 28/1/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>dirk elzinga wrote:
>> Yes. I should have been more precise. As Rob pointed out, /h/ in
>> Dutch and German is voiced, and in English intervocalically.
>
>I've heard that claim, but it must be only for some dialects - there is
>most definitely no voicing in my intervocalic /h/, no matter how slow or
>fast I say words like "ahoy", I can feel no voicing in the /h/.
Same with me, infact.  I always used the voiceless variety.

But the voiceless /h/ of Afrikaans is a very different sound - and it is
voiceless.
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At 11:46 pm -0500 28/1/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> That, I believe, is the common understanding of these terms. It is what
>> I've understood for 40 years or so.  In that analysis it simply does not
>> make sense to talk about voiceless approximants - as soon as these souns
>> are devoiced there is friction.
>
>I disagree.  /j_0/ may have a VERY slight friction, but it's far less
>friction than /C/.
Ah, but there is friction.  I agree it is less than [C].  But then [b_0] is
not the same as [p] (unaspirated). When a normally voiced sound is devoiced
(or partly devoiced) it will IME rarely bacome completely identical with
the voiceless counterpart.

But I have heard [j] pronounced with some friction. European Spaniards,
e.g. seem to do this so that {yo} tends to sound to me more like [Zo] than
the [jo] given in text books.

>Unless you want to come up with a new term to
>describe that difference, "weak fricative", perhaps?, voiceless
>aproximate is quite adequate.
Only approximately   ;)

Personally, I don't think there is a hard and fast division between
fricatives & approximants - just two extremes: no friction on the far
approximant 'left' through to very rasping friction on the fricative
'right', so to speak, with many (possibly most) sounds falling somewhere
between.

>> this analysis regards, e.g. the [h] in [h&t] as the voiceless
>> equivalent of [&], and the [h] in [hIt] as the voiceless equivalent of [I],
>> etc.  In such an analysis, of course, there are as many aitches as vowels,
>> each being, so to speak, a voiceless vowel, i.e. voiceless approximant.
>
>Actually, I quite agree with that analysis.  I can find absolutely on
>friction in MY pronunciation of /h/, altho I have heard friction in some
>idiolects.  To me, /h/ is a voiceless vowel, with allophones [I_0],
>[&_0], etc.  I wonder if some of this debate arises from simply
>different linguists' idiolects?
Partly, I guess.  It also varies within language.  In Welsh speaking areas
and in many parts of Scotland /h/ is more energetically pronounced than in
some other dialects (and in many, in fact, it is silent except in formal
speech) - those speakers certainly give it a fricative pronunciation.

But it also, I think, depends how [h] functions within a language.  In
ancient Greek, e.g. one gets a better understanding of the phonotactics of
the language if [h] is regarded as a prosody (i.e. suprasegmental feature)
rather than as a phoneme.
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At 1:17 am -0600 29/1/00, raccoon@ELKNET.NET wrote:
[....]
>Hmm. It always has, and still does, seem odd to me to conceive of /h/ as a
>(semi)vowel,
Me too.

>but if it in fact IS, that would make the laryngeal theory of
>PIE make more sense.
I know   :)

>For those who don't know, it holds that there were
>several (usually 3) different 'laryngeal' phonemes in Proto-Indo-European,
>and each one has a vocalic and a non-vocalic allophone, much like /i/ and
>/j/ were allophones in PIE. Further, each of the laryngeals has a different
>effect on the vowels immediately before or after it;   *H1e comes out like
>*e, *H2e comes out like *a, and *H3e comes out like *o. So maybe *H1 was a
>kind of /e/, *H2 a kind of /a/, and *H3 a kind of /o/. Still, I don't
>understand what exactly separates vowels from consonants, and how /h/ could
>be vocalic.
And some scholars give the 'laryngeals' as /@1/, /@2/ and /@3/; this
suggests the relation between [*H] ~ [@] is like that between [j] ~ [i].
Maybe [*H] was the glottal approximant I mentioned in the 1st section above
:)





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