Re: ontology of glottalized segments?

On Aug 11, 2004, at 12:00 AM, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> Does anyone know any phonetic or phonological facts about how
> glottalized consonants arise?  I've heard that acoustically they
> sometimes are treated as "hypervoiceless".  I'm trying to come
> up with a way for them to arise naturally in Phaleran historical
> phonology without having to make reference to borrowings from
> C'ali, which, of course, has plenty of them, and would thus be too
> easy.
>
> (Dirk, do you know?)
I don't. Paul already mentioned the only bits that I'm familiar with,
namely the Sindhi implosives which are the result of "hypervoicing"
(you actually get a reversal of airflow if you hold a voiced stop long
enough -- hence, an implosive). I don't know how a language would
develop a glottalized series from something else, but here's a thought.
In some varieties of English (no, I'm not starting YAEPT), syllable
final stops are pre-glottalized: [k_h&?t] 'cat'. In allegro speech, the
supralaryngeal gesture may be absent altogether, giving [k_h&?]. If
there were a following morph which began with a voiceless stop, it
doesn't seem too far-fetched to attach the constricted glottis gesture
to the stop and get a glottalized consonant. I'm emphatically *not*
saying this happens in English. But in a parallel universe, English'
(English-prime) might develop this feature.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts." - Thomas Carlyle

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