Re: [TIED] Beekes' PIE Consonants & Glottalized Consonants.

PG: The transcription used by Beekes actually implies ejectives [t’] rather than preglottalised stops (such as [ʔt] – a sound often heard in British English cat).

MO: I wondered about that. I also wonder what [tˀ] (t+modifier letter glottal stop, 704) is supposed to symbolize, or if it's even possible. Knowing exactly what a squiggle in a book is supposed to represent in Unicode is also difficult. The transcription Piotr uses, [t’] has what unipad calls a right single quotation mark; there is also the modifer letter apostrophe, 02BC (html 700).

 

So. What's the difference between preglottalization and an ejective?

 

I believe you that [ʔt] really represent 'cat' for some 'accents'. Fascinating. What's happened to the vowel. I get an itty-bitty schwa.

PG: The stop burst accompanying the release of an ejective is indeed very strong, but when you say that nasalisation ‘is difficult to avoid’ it makes me wonder whether you managed to produce a true ejective or some other type of sound involving a glottal closure. You’ll find a recipe for ejectives in the forthcoming phoNet posting.

MO: Probably something different. I was pushing the sound stream around the mouth to see what happened. b+glottal can be done without nasalization.

PG: One could consider *d = [d̰] (creaky voiced, a.k.a. ‘vocal fry’ in American terminology, i.e. strongly laryngealised stops). Creak phonation consists in the low-frequency, irregular vibration of an unusually heavy mass of strongly adducted, thickened and slackened vocal folds, which might easily result in its being limited to a single occurrence in a morpheme.

MO: I've heard of 'creaky-voiced' but have no experience relating this description to an actual sound. One is tempted to think of this as the stage-voice you hear associated with elderly characters, a voice with a waver, but this is probably wrong.

PG: Breathy voice, on the other hand, requires little voicing effort and would not be more restricted in its distribution than voicelessness or modal (regular) voice, hence the free occurrence of *dH.

MO: I'm not sure what 'breathy-voiced' means either, but it's what I associated with the (male-version) of a 'Bensonhurst accent'. This is what passes as the modern 'Brooklyn accent'. Males move their register down low, perhaps unnaturally low, with a forcefulness of enunciation that generates a strong air stream; it's not really added aitches, but the force with which it is said.

 

Mark.