Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

Hi!

Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> writes:
> On 3/26/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> > it's difficult for me to make a distinction
> > between words with and without an initial glottal stop. The tendency is
> > to add a glottal stop before an initial vowel.
>
> Ah yes, same here.
And here, due to L1 influence.  I try to keep it down in English, but
phonemic distinction is very hard (as in Hawai?ian)

> (I believe German has a near-obligatory glottal stop before
> word-initial -- possibly even morpheme-initial -- vowels, so I have
> the same tendency.)
>...
I think it is stem initial (suffixes may start with vowels).

And I also think it was one of the major problems for me when learning
Dutch, which does not seem to have this glottal stop constraint.
Learning Dutch was fascinating because learning to speak was easier
(mainly avoiding to use false friends) than learning to listen -- it
took me months to reconstruct morpheme breaks in what I heard.  That's
so easy in German (I thought) since all stems start with a
consonant. :-) (It might be less obvious to non-L1 speakers.)


Coming back to hard phones: I find unaspirated unvoiced stops hard to
produce, too, but even more so aspirated voiced stops.  Indic langs
are not made for me.  And the one thing I've so far not managed to
even distinguish passively are the Korean glottalised stops.  Even if
I don't produce some phones well, at least I can hear some difference.
But not so for these glottalised stops.  For me, they sound just like
unaspirated unvoiced stops.  In producing, a Korean told me I come
near when doing ejectives, but that's cheating, of course. :-)

**Henrik
--
Relay 13 is online:
http://www.conlang.info/relay13/

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