Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Malay seems to have initial long consonant clusters.  Even plosives.
> The first part of these will probably belong to the first syllable of
> the word and not to the unspoken previous one. :-)
>
>    /kitO/  'us'
>    /k:itO/ 'to us'
>
I could just barely make out a difference in this word.  The word with
/b/:/b:/ was a little more noticeable.  (This is Pattani-- a mainland
dialect-- not, of course, standard Malay)
> (Source:
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/appe
ndix/languages/malay/malay.html)
>
> No idea how you really pronounce those (but you may listen to the
> speaker), but maybe you have to *look* at people to see how long the
> pause is before they start to speak. :-)))
Actually that's probably the case. And in the flow of speech it might be a
little clearer too.
In a Field Methods class with an Achenese speaker, we encountered phonemic
/p b m/, medial clusters /mp, mb/ and a very strange "tense" initial "m"
that was best detected by looking at the speaker-- the lips were more
tightly pressed together. Rare, but there were a few min. pairs.  Oddly, it
corresponded to Indonesian words with either /m/ or /b/.

One could speculate that these odd features are due to loss of some old
prefix, or contact with unrelated languages of mainland SE Asia.