Re: Click consonants

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 12:50:27 -0500, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote:
>>
>> If the difference isn't phonemic in a particular language, it might be
>nice
>> to specify whether the accompaniment is voiced or voiceless, velar or
>> uvular, aspirated or unaspirated, in free variation, etc., but that's a
>> matter of how much detail the author wants to put into the phonological
>> description.
>But without that information, the description of the language is incomplete;
>for sure, someone learning to speak the lang. needs the information. (Though
>it may be incidental to someone who's merely analyzing it to see, for ex.,
>what the word-order rules are.)
True, but that's the case with all sounds of the language (vowels in
particular), not just clicks. If you want to learn to speak ány language
with the proper accent, you're not likely to get the necessary information
from just reading about the phonology; you'll need audio recordings as
well.

Actually, there aren't many conlangs that are described in enough detail to
learn to speak like a native. Completeness is an ambitious goal, and not
everyone's going to want to fill in all the details for each of their
languages. And since very few people expect that anyone's going to actually
want to learn to spéak their lang, it's understandable that descriptions of
conlang phonology are far from complete.

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