Isidora Zamora wrote:
> 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.
I could be wrong. (As I see I was, upon due consideration, about Paul
Bennett's k-t "click".) My impression was that it's a concommitant of the
voicing-- you have to release the velum first so that the trapped air is
"swallowed" and enables the vocal cords to vibrate. But I've never actually
heard one produced natively...........
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.
>
>(Ejectives are awfully fun, too....
Agreed. Perhaps I'll have a descendant of Proto-Kash change the *aspirated
vl. stops to ejectives..........