Re: Conlang for giant caterpillars

>> > Is that the same thing as a "lateralized sibilant"?
>> Yes, as far as I know. Kirshenbaum's ASCII IPA (that I use for the
>> Valdyan speech sounds on my web page) has it als "s<lat>".
>Obviously,
>> it can be approached from the 's' side as well as from the 'l' side.
>>
>> As Sally remarked in another message, it's indeed the Welsh 'll'
>> sound. Valdyan also has it (I transliterate it 'lh'), and IIRC
>> Teonaht too.
This is very weird...
I learned about the Welsh "ll" a long time ago, when i read the book "The
Grey King" in the series _The Dark is Rising_ by Susan Cooper.  So i've
always thought of it as a kind of "L", which usually came out of my mouth
closer to the combination [hl] than to the actual fricative itself.
A long, long, long time ago, the Hebrew letters _ssin_ collapsed into the
_samekh_ [s], even though it's written with the same letter as the _shin_
[S].

So now what i've got running around in my head is an S that somehow is a
kind of L at the same time, but releases more saliva than sound!

So i tried to put it into words, and my tounge balked, because "no, this
is an S, not an L!".
I finally found something to try, the first line of a song:

"ssamei'ahh tessamahh / rei`im rei`im ha'ahuvim..."

[s<l>amejaH t@s<l>amaH rejim rejim ha?ahuvim]

And it still wouldn't work, until i forced myself to think of it as
"hl"/"ll" instead of "ss" ("llamei'ahh tellamahh..."), but then it still
kept on sliding into a [S].

I guess this means the Welsh really are the Ten Lost Tribes after all,
eh?  :)

The emphatic-lateralized-[D] was actually easier!


-Stephen (Steg), who is lucky he doesn't have a [s<l>] in his name

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