Re: Click consonants

At 02:39 PM 12/7/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Paul Bennett wrote:
>
> > Project WC8 (still needs a name) has a single alveolar click, and an
> > alveolar velaric egressive, which is nick-named "the anti-click" in my
> > notes. It has a click-like sound, and is produced by the same mouth-shape,
> > but with the release of positive pressure instead of an implosion. I might
> > very well sound like a simultaneous /k/ and /t/.
> >
>I can't do clicks in the flow of speech at all......:-((( What you describe
>sounds more like an "ejective k with (rapid or near-simultaneous) alveolar
>co-articulation"; at least I can do it, as well as variants with any two
>dissimilar voiceless stops/affricates. Rather fun to do.......  Some African
>languages are said to have co-articulated /kp/ (egressive) and /gb/
>(ingressive), but not ejective AFAIK
Kpelle, spoken in Liberia, has the co-articulated stops that you just
described.  They are called labiovelars.  Igbo has these phonemes as
well.  I studied Kpelle for two semesters in a Field Methods in Linguistics
course, and I don't remember the /gb/ being ingressive.  However, I have
read that the labiovelar stops have slightly different phonetic
realizations in each of the languages that has them in its phonemic
inventory, so it is possible that the /gb/ is ingressive in some language.

If I am remebering correctly, the geograhical distribution of labiovelar
stops is restricted to West Africa.  Labiovelars are pretty fun,
IMO.  There is an odd, sort of popping quality to them, but they are very
definitely not ejective.  (Ejectives are awfully fun, too.  I took
Structure of Amharic in college and got exposed to ejectives there.  Now
that I think about it, I should have put ejectives into one of my
conlangs.  It's too late now, though, at least for the major three...but I
might just have to find a way to introduce ejectives into one of the
language families.  I suppose that I could introduce them into the
proto-language and have them merge with other phonemes in some of the
daughter languages.  Ejectives are so fun, and they're actually easier for
me to pronounce than the extensive series of labialized consonants that I
put into Trehelish.  I know that there will be at least one other language
family in the future of my conworld.  I suppose the ejectives could go there.)

Isidora

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