vijayjohn wrote:That kind of has to do with voicing...and no, it's between "plain," "tense," and "aspirated."
vijayjohn wrote:The plain ones can be voiced. The tense ones involve constriction of the glottis FWICT.
Alright, so it's definitely naturalistic enough to have something kinda similar in a conlang.
Thanks.
Maybe I was subconsciously influenced by Korean coming up with that, although the whole "need" for that three-way distinction came from wanting to use certain digraphs and having to come up with some "logical" phonemes to go with them... vijayjohn wrote:Oh, is that all? Well, Malayalam has that. [kʰ] is always voiceless, and [g] is always voiced, but /k/ (and in fact also /gʱ/) can be either voiceless or voiced (depending on phonetic environment in the case of /k/ and on speaker variation in the case of /gʱ/. Most speakers pronounce the breathy voiced stops as just plain voiceless while insisting they don't, though
). Same goes for all other plosives in Malayalam. The only problem is that the aspirates and voiced consonants are borrowed from Sanskrit, so it might be hard to argue that they're actually phonemes. Also, some speakers may have [g] corresponding to other speakers' [kʰ] in some environments (not sure whether anyone replaces [g] with [k], though).
Interesting, especially the last part since [g] and [kʰ] seem like the most different out of those. If both the aspirated and voiced ones only occur in Sanskrit loanwords, does that mean Malayalam originally had only /k/?
vijayjohn wrote:Is there anything particularly American about it? Isn't that the R most native speakers of English use? (Except maybe in Scotland or something).
I guess it's the default in most varieties if it's just [ɻ] or something, but if it's [ɻʷˤ] with R-colouration on adjacent vowels, AFAIK that's something that happens only in (some) American English? Maybe in a lot of British English it's labialised [ɹ̠ʷ~ɻʷ], but I don't think it sounds pharyngealised/whateverised like the stereotypically American one or even as far back most of the time? Also, maybe I'm totally wrong, but "darkening" is at least typically not a thing in Irish English, right? Because I really like the Irish R, which to my ears sounds like [ɹ̠~ɻ], at least usually without any kind of secondary articulation? Maybe even fricated [ɹ̠̝~ɻ̝] and/or devoiced in some contexts?
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Random thing: my brother and me went to get pizzas from the local pizzeria last Sunday and while we were waiting, at one of the tables there was a group of people who spoke some language that we couldn't recognise with certainty but was obviously some Iranian language. It sounded more like Kurdish than anything else, but that impression could've been influenced by them
looking so much like Kurds. Seems like at least the language couldn't have been Kurdish, though, because they definitely said [dær~d̪æɾ] a lot, but apparently it doesn't exist as a preposition in Kurdish like it does in Persian.
I guess it could've literally just been Persian, even though I'm kinda sceptical about that since it sounded so much like Kurdish except for the [dær~d̪æɾ] thing. Is there some Iranian language that sounds more like Kurdish but uses that preposition? Or is there some word in Kurdish that it could've been, if it wasn't a preposition after all? Or maybe it really was just Persian, if the speakers were Kurds so it sounded more like Kurdish somehow...? But why would Kurds be speaking Persian?