Re: Velar approximant?

Quoting "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>:

> Dear CONLANG phonologists,
>
> Recently I've been considering again what exactly is denoted by the smooth
> breathing mark on Ebisédian vowels. In the Roman orthography, the smooth
> breathing is indicated by what the "tear-drop" accent, a teardrop-shaped
> diacritic over the vowel. In ASCII orthography, this is indicated by a
> prefixed backtick (`). For the vowels _u_, _w_, and _y_, the meaning of
> this "tear-drop" accent is quite clear:
> 	`u = [wu]
> 	`w = [w8]
> 	`y = [Hy]
>
> However, it is rather unclear what it means when applied to open vowels
> like _0_ [A] or _a_ [a]. Previously, I had described it as being preceded
> with a semivowelized form of the same vowel, eg., _`a_ = [a_^a].
> Recently, however, from my observation of Ebisédian pronunciation, it
> seems that the sound is perhaps better described as a velar approximant.
> I.e., _`a_ is really [M\a], and _`o_ is [M\o]. (Although it is unclear
> whether _`o_ is really [M\o] rather than [7_^o].)
>
> Does anyone have a recording of [M\] so that I can confirm my findings?
> :-)
Try this:

http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ipachart_cons_pulm.html

AFMCL, Classical Klaish 'h' relates to /a/ much like 'j' to /i/ and 'w' to /u/
(ie, mostly by turning up next to it to prevent hiatus). Pronunciation seems
to've varied - most commonly a voiced pharyngeal or glottal fricative. It
generally disappears in the daughter languages, but becomes [h] initially in
Telendlest and Searixina. In the former it shares this sad fate with
initial /x/ and /G/.

(Apparently there's a universal saying that you can't merge distinctions in
onsets without also doing it in coda position, but if so someone forgot to
tell Telendlest - [x] and [G] remain contrastive in codas, despite as
mentioned merging as [h] in onsets.)

                                                          Andreas