Re: /w/ vs /B/

On 5/28/07, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> In Old Urianian I have to deal with an unrounded /B/ (from IE bh)
> existing alongside the rounded /w/ (unchanged from IE). So far I have
> assumed they have independent evolution in later stages of the
> language. But since they must sound pretty much alike I wonder if
> they will have a tendency to merge.
Not going far into the exotic, Spanish has both [B] and [w] as allophones
of /b/ and /u/ respectively, and they seem to get along fine. Now [B] only
appears between vowels and [w] is not common there, so I can't find a
minimal pair, but the first two syllables of |ahueca| [a'weka] and |abeja|
[a'Bexa] are clearly distinguishable to native speakers. Note however that
Spanish doesn't like lone glides and [w] tends to be realized as [gw] or
[Gw]. Maybe you can go with that as well.

-- Pablo D. Flores <pablodavidflores@...>
   http://artoflanguage.blogspot.com/