Re: Unilang: the Phonology

Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>Another feature that I'm keen on adding is nasal  stop onsets (=
>prenasalized stops, approximately). That's somewhat more debatable, of
>course, so I haven't entirely decided. This is technically phonotactics,
but
>that whole thread might as well have belonged to this one, phonotactics
>properly being a subset of phonology.
>
>My reasoning would be primarily that they seem quite common; anybody know
>the statistics? Also that I don't find them inherently hard to pronounce,
>even though they're not common in "our" languages ("us" being the
>IE-speaking Westerners).
>
>So, question: how easy or hard do list members find it to pronounce
>something like [mbi], [ndi], or [Ngo]? Is that necessarily harder for the
>average human than [bli] or [dri]?>
I love prenasalized stops!  But maybe you should think twice about using
them.

Lots of (non-major, sadly) languages have them-- Africa, eastern Indonesia,
Fiji  are areas that spring to mind.  They're not that hard to produce, but
somehow the mere appearance of them seems to totally flummox most
Westerners.  Without training, we tend to make the nasal onset syllabic--
[@m.bi] or [n=.di] etc. which works, but isn't actually "right"; maybe such
a pronunciation would be "close enough" in an auxlang (regional variation).

There was a Michigan football player a few years back (now in the pros, I
think) of Fijian origin-- named Biakabatuka I think.  Since Fij. {b} = [mb]
is not immediately obvious, his name was never pronounced correctly.
(Though in fairness, perhaps he himself had Americanized it; I don't know)

The real bugaboo for Americans (how about Europeans?) is initial [N],
especially as written {ng}.  During our Vietnam episode, it took the news
readers a long time to get President Ngo's name right-- it was either [no]
or [go] or [En.go].  Even the infamous Mme. Nhu [ñu] fared better.

My students and I had a semester-long  encounter with an Indonesian language
of Flores (Lio, a relative of Nga'da ['Na.?da]) which had contrastive
(initial and medial) labial-dental-velar stops/voiceless, voiced,
prenasalized voiced, preglottalized voiced--
and frankly, it was difficult to distinguish the vd/prenas/preglot. contrast
in the flow of speech.