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Re: Number

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Monday, August 6, 2001, 3:48
On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, Jesse Bangs wrote:

YHL:
> > I was trying to figure out how in the heck you would hear a [?] > > before a vowel <rueful look> since the prof for that class told us > > that technically when you say a vowel (without something else > > before > > it??) there's always a glottal stop, so if you said [qaItSaref] by > > itself, how would you know? :-/ The somewhat tentative fix for > > that > > was to make {q} [?] between two vowels, [x] otherwise. <looking > > I like the tentative fix myself, but I don't think there's a problem with > having phonemic initial /?/. *My* phonetics teacher said that it is > possible to pronounce a vowel-initial word without a glottal stop, though > he might have said that no languages actually make use of that > distinction. If you want to keep {q} fundamentally a stop, you could > replace it with something stronger initial positions, like a pharyngeal > stop.
<rueful look> I just happen to like [x] despite my difficulty pronouncing it before high vowels. I think I'll keep the fix for now...who knows what dialectal variations will evolve later? (I love dialects. It gives me an excuse to try different configurations!) Thanks. YHL

Reply

Muke Tever <alrivera@...>