Re: glottals

On Thursday, January 29, 2004, at 05:03  PM, Roger Mills wrote:

> Alexandre Lang wrote:
>
>
>>> OTOH [aa] will most likely involve continuous voicing in the interval
>>> between the two a's (the so-called "voiced h", or "hiatus". It's two
>>> distinct syllables.  Note that that [a(H)a] is not a long a, which is
>>> simply
>>> the prolongation of the single vowel sound, so [a:], usually
>>> considered
>>> just
>>> one distinct syllable.
>>
>> Is it phonetically legal to have [aa]? i always thought it wasn't
>> possible to have 2 vowels together in a row...
>> --
> I don't see why not, _phonetically_; after all, you can have sequences
> of
> two distinct V (cf. the Fr. name Raoul, or Span. leer, imperative lee,
> pret.
> leí), so identicals must be possible too. But it's true that most
> natlangs
> seem to go out of their way to avoid such sequences, usually by
> inserting
> various glides-- [j] after front vowels, [w] after rounded vowels, and
> ...what?... between identicals?  That varies, sometimes elision,
> sometimes a
> glottal stop, sometimes what I'm calling the "voiced h".  At least in
> my
> pronuciation of "Raoul" it is 2 distinct syllables, no pause inbetween
> the a
> and the u.  Similarly in Engl., it's common to pronounce "sea eagle"
> (also
> known as "ern(e)" ) as ['si(H)"ig@l] (though some might prefer a
> glottal
> stop between the two vowels
One of the phonological features which distinguishes Goshute from other
Shoshoni dialects is the deletion of medial glottal stops, leaving
behind a sequence of vowels in separate syllables (and a HL pitch
contour). So Shoshoni ['mo?o] 'leg' becomes Goshute ['moo] (or more
narrowly, ['mo_H o_L]).

Dirk