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Re: ontology of glottalized segments?

From:Paul Roser <pkroser@...>
Date:Thursday, August 12, 2004, 14:16
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 15:27:37 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
wrote:

>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.
I paged through Fallon's book on ejectives, but he doesn't really speculate on how they might have arisen in most languages - the one that he does, Yapese, one of only two Austronesian lgs to have ejectives, got them from vowel loss: CV? -> C? ~ C' Offhand I don't know what the conditions were for vowel loss, or whether Yapese can have ejectives in initial position (it has them in medial and final). He does mention a phenomenon in Bella Coola where underlying V?C can have varying surface realizations VVC/V:C with a long vowel or VC' with a short vowel and ejective. Fallon also makes a distinction (cross-linguistically) between strong and weak (or fortis/lenis) ejectives - strong/fortis ejectives have a noticeable 'pop' and a longer Voice Onset Time (the time between the release of the stop and the beginning of the vowel), while weak/ lenis ejectives have a short VOT and may become plain or creaky-voiced or implosive stops diachronically. No known language contrasts weak and strong ejectives, but daughters of a language that had ejectives might show such a contrast. =================================================================== On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 23:40:38 +0100, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
>Glottalized stops (i.e. glottal-oral) are the realization of coda >(or foot-internal) /ptk/ in Geordie (Newcastle) and are at least >an allophone of coda /ptk/ in some accents of the North of England >(e.g. Yorkshire) &, I believe, New York City. But I am not aware of >any accent that has a three way surface *contrast* between [d] [t] >and [t']/[t^?], but conceivably -- I've never checked -- it might >found in "pig it" : "picket" : "pick it".
On an old recording of Woody Allen doing his stand-up routine (probably dating to the late 50s or early 60s) he produces very clear ejectives at the ends of some words in pre-pausal position, particularly with final /k/, but I can't recall if he does it in mid-sentence. If I can find the recording, I'll have to go back and check, but my suspicion is that it is largely a pre-pausal/ sentence-final phenomenon. Bfowol

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And Rosta <a.rosta@...>