Re: And who needs vowels?

[Teoh:]
>(...) And so, I dreamed of a conlang where all vowels have been
>elided and substituted with sonorant consonants, and some words consist
>of nothing but stops. For example:
(...)
>bxtm ["bx=tm=]
>pstng [ps"tN=]
These two are particularily nice IMO :)


>Now, [l=] alone isn't all *that* interesting. The interesting part is
>that it is (relatively) easy to pronounce two different kinds of [l=],
>one high (palatised?), and one low (velarized? maybe retroflex?).
So [l;=] and [5=], right?
"Plain" is naturally an option too, and as you note later, so is labialized.
Or pharyngealized, even: [l_?\=]
(BTW I wunder if any of the African ATR/RTR vowel langs have syllabic
resonants with the same distinction...)


>[l] would, of course, interact with dentals to produce [K] and [K\], so
>if one were to transcribe a foreign name, say Brazil, into this
>language, one would get:
>
>Брзль [brz="K\=]
I'd expect maybe [br=z;K\=]...


>Also, some consonants seem to lend themselves well to rounded/unrounded
>distinctions, such as [x]. So бохь might be
>pronounced [bx_w=], for
>instance. (The written vowel is, of course, not pronounced, and has in
>retrospective con-history become a labialization sign.)
>
>One can make a most peculiar sound trying to pronounce
>оль [l_w=]. I'm
>not sure whether to include this in the prospective conlang yet...
For the record, both of my voiceless-consonant-only xenosketchlangs have a
three-way labialization contrast. It seems to mimic one of the vowel
formants (I forgot which # exactly) so you can get "tone" despite the lack
of voice. :)


>Old Tibetan has long initial clusters? Heh, I'd never expect that from a
>Sinitic language (or am I missing something here?). :-)
According to what I've so far gleamed from a long guide to Tibeto-Burman
languages, a PDF of which was linked here a few months ago, they have many
diacronic layers of of 1- or 2-consonant prefixes. These are usually
pronounced with a shwa but apparently not in Tibetan... One of the example
phrases in Tibetan's WP article is "Srong rtsan Sgam po" FWIW.


>/'b/ is a weird word where you don't part your lips
>at all, and the sound consists only of the prevoicing of the /b/. The
>initial glottal stop is merely to make this sound more forceful so that
>it is audible. (The resulting sound is a bit like choking. :-P)
Try the uvular for a slightly better choking-imitation sound. ;D


[Eric:]
>Before I thought about/read about syllabic sibilants, I always  considered
>e.g. <street> to have one syllable; but since then it  actually feels to me
>like it has two: [s=tr\i:t_}]. But then I'm odd :)
Feels like more than one to me too, & ditto with codas as in eg. "sixths",
naturally. I'd say that these most of the time attach to the preceding /
following syllable however ("the stumps were" = [D@s.t6mp .swEr\`]) but
might partially syllabify when that would not help ("leaps from" =
[lip.s.fr\`Qm])


>Also, is it possible for a stop to be "truly" syllabic? I seem to  remember
>reading about a language where some stops *act* as if  they're syllabic,
>but phonetically they have a schwa next to them.
It depends. A voiceless stop cannot really quite be the peak of a syllable.
Frex [p:=_}] is pretty much equivalent to not saying anything at all; and
whereas an isolated /kt/ is not very hard to pronounce, I'd say it actually
comes out as something like [kh=t] or [kth=]. Affricates and voiced stops
would have better chances at syllabicity (altho I'd argue it's the fricativ
part that's syllabic in the first case). I can do [xg=t] or [tS=f] or stuff
to that extent, but an attempted, say, *[ts)=m] inevitably turns into
[ts=.m=].


>I wonder if tone can really be distinguished on syllabic consonants.
Tone is a purely laryngeal feature - as long as the segment is voiced, it's
possible for it to have tone. Niger-Congo & Sino-Tibetan languages do tend
to include tone on their syllabic resonants whenever they happen to have
any. (This is also the key in distinguishing prenasalized phones from phones
preceded by a syllabic nasal, AIUI.)

John Vertical

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