Re: Another new lang

At 3:34 pm -0800 18/2/00, Keolah Kedaire wrote:
[...]
>
>There are aspirated r and l sounds, right?
Aspirated apically trilled r certainly - it occurs in Welsh and is written
'rh'.

It sounds just like [h] and [r] pronounced simultaneously.  Some consider
it to be a voiceless /r/ and time has been wasted arguing this.  It is
_certainly_ both voiceless & aspirated (I've heard it often enough & can
pronounce it with no difficulty).  Whether the devoicing is the primary
feature & the aspiration is secondary or whether, as I think, it's tother
way round is IMHO not worth arguing over.

But aspirated l sounds?  Certainly it occurs in English as an allophone of
/l/ in words like 'plain' & 'clean'.  Whether it ever occurs as a separate
phoneme, I'm less certain.  Old English 'hl' was originally /xl/ then, I
guess, /hl/ but gave way at an early date to [l]; the Icelandic 'hl' is,
I'm assured by Philip Jonsson, the voiceless lateral fricate like the Welsh
'll', which I am familiar with, and the 'hl' of the Nguni languages (e.g.
Zulu, Xhosa) which I have heard and is the same as the Welsh 'll'.
Similary Philip, who knows something of Tibetan, says the Tibetan sound
transcribed as 'lh' (e.g. Lhasa) is the same voiceless lateral fricative.

I have a theory that the devoiced/ aspirated l is happy being an allophone
but becomes unstable if, for some reason, it finds itself being given
phonemic status and that it either coalesces with plain ol' [l] or becomes
the voiceless lateral fricative.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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