Re: Voiced Velar Fricative

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000 06:23:05 -0700, Barry Garcia
<Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:

>I borrowed a book through interlibrary loan (from The University of Texas
>at Arlington, BTW) on my grandfather's dialect of Visayan (A Philippine
>Language) called "Aklanon" (Akeanon), and it says that it includes a
>unique sound among the West Visayan Languages, which is the voiced velar
>fricative. It tells how to make the sound, but i just cant seem to do it.
>What other languages have this sound (better yet, where can I hear this
>sound on the web)?
I think maybe Armenian might have it, and possibly Arabic, but I'm not
certain if they're velar or uvular. My language Gjarrda has this sound, and
you can hear sound samples (RealAudio only, unfortunately) of Gjarrda on my
web page (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Gjarrda/spelling.html). Specific
words that demonstrate this sound are:

"digh"  http://www.io.com/~hmiller/audio/j-digh.ra
"gheil" http://www.io.com/~hmiller/audio/j-ghel.ra

>An interesting bit of info on it is, that in Akeanon, it is written as
>"e", as in the native spelling for "Aklanon". It's also interesting to
>note that this sound occurs where other Philippine languages would have
>"l". The book also says it usually occurs with a or o, and rarely with i.
>The book makes sure to point out that l is usually with i, and not usually
>the voiced velar fricative. Any reasons for this, and why would l and the
>voiced velar fricative be linked?
Interesting. Some English speakers use a sound that reminds me of a voiced
uvular fricative for /l/ (at least in certain contexts). Armenian "gh"
seems to be related to "l" sounds in other languages, as far as I can tell
from what little I've seen of Armenian. Perhaps Akeanon /e/ developed from
a velarized /l/, which can be associated with back vowels as in Irish or
Russian.

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