Re: glottals

From: "Alexandre Lang" <allexpro@...>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 12:08 AM
Subject: glottals


> i'm having a few troubles with glottals.
> First of all, i'm not sure i can pronounce [h] in \ah\.
> Maybe it's cuz i just know European langauges or there's something wrong
> with my tongue.
> It almost seems impossible to me.
> I can pronounce something like it, but i'm not sure if it's it.
> Is it supposed to be hard to pronounce?
> Second, how can i figure out how [?] and [h\] sound like?
> --
>   Alexandre Lang
>   allexpro@eml.cc
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different.
>
Are you French? I'm just guessing, it's because your first name is
"Alexandre". In other (non-Romanic) European languages, there are [h]'s,
though ...
Have you got a microphone so that you can record your [h]?
[?] is a glottal stop. The airflow from the lungs is completely stopped,
like in English "uh-oh" (X-Sampa) [%V?O_U] or the German children's word for
"bowel movement", "A-a" (X-Sampa) [%A?A:].
How [h\] sounds I only can guess either. I guess it's practically a more
intense, more voiced version of [h].
[h] is like when you breathe at a window glass to smear matchstick men on it
with your finger, but it's further back in your throat, not in your mouth
... hard to explain. Look at http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ under
Consonants (Pulmonic) for listening to the sounds. Otherwise: practice,
practice, practice. Some people say, you only learn the necessary phonemes
of your mother language as a baby and nothing more and it would be difficult
to learn other phonemes later, but that's untrue. Learning a new foreign
phoneme is not impossible for adults, it just must be practiced. When you've
figured out how the IPA table works, you can actually quite well produce any
listed sound I think.


Carsten Becker

--------------------------------------------------
http://www.beckerscarsten.de/
http://gitarrenklampfer.deviantart.com/

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