Re: A bunch of phonological questions

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:31:30 +0300, John Vertical
<johnvertical@...> wrote:

>Paul Roser wrote:
>> Lateral release, like nasal release, applies to non-affricated
>> stops that precede laterals (or nasals) and are *not* released
>> prior to the lateral or nasal articulation. By definition a
>> lateral affricate would have lateral release.
>
> Hmm, that's kinda ... too simple. So if [_l] xor [_n] are not
> applicable to any vowels that are not followed by a (homorganic?
> is that a requisite too?) lateral xor nasal, why is there a need
> for two different diacritics? It's starting to seem to me that
> just one release diacritic (say, $) would be enough, one that
> means "not released independently":
>/t_h/ = /t$h/
>/t_ll/ = /t$l/
>/t_nn/ = /t$n/
>/ts)/ = /t$s/
>/tK)/ = /t$K/
>/t_} / = /t$ /
There *is* a generic unreleased diacritic, a little right-angle
bracket sort of thing, but I don't think it's ever used with
affricates /ts), tK)/ or with aspiration /t_h/. I'm not sure
what the last one you list, /t_}/, is supposed to be...
IMO you *can* use the unreleased diacritic interchangeably
with either the nasal- or lateral-release diacritics (if the
following nasal or lateral were homorganic).

I think nasal/lateral release only apply to stops, and only
if the sequence is homorganic (though lateral release as a
diacritic has sometimes also been used to indicate things like
lateralized taps or fricatives - though I can't recall seeing
the nasal release diacritic used that way).

Using nasal or lateral release with vowels doesn't make sense
to me - 'release' implies the closure of a stop, and there is
no closure involved in vowel production.

> Yes, that does help. I was asking this because I was wondering
> if coronal affricates were the most common for POA reasons or
> because they're sibilant affricates. But if /tK)/ is not a
> sibilant, I guess it's the POA...
Crosslinguistically I think coronal affricates /ts, tS/ are most
common for two reasons - one, that coronals tend to have more types
of articulations than other POAs -- for instance, if a language
has stops, nasals, laterals, trills, & fricatives, it probably
has all of those in the coronal region and probably lacks at
least some of them in the peripheral regions (no language has
distinctive labial laterals, very very few have labial or dorsal
trills or dorsal laterals), this being partly due to the greater
flexibility of articulators in the coronal region -- and two,
central fricatives /s, S/ are more pervasive than lateral
fricatives (which is probably tied to an ease of production
factor - central fricatives being easier to produce than laterals).

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single language that has
/K/ that does not also have either /s/ or /S/, and if a language has
a lateral affricate /tK)/ it almost certainly also has /ts)/ & /s/
(or /tS)/ & /S/).

-Bfowol