>By lip rounding, I think I meant the vibration you can experience in
>the lips making [p] and [b], bubbabubbabubbabub, the lip spasm you >get
>when you say 'rubber baby buggy bumpers' too fast.
Like Piotr said, What do you mean, Mark? The vibration you're feeling is
either the voicing of English [b] or the fact that your finger is stuck in
an outlet. First, get your finger out of the outlet. Then, we can talk about
the _real_ phonetic qualities of [b] :)
As to the question about "Arabian", I assume "Arabic" was meant. And yeah,
proto-Semitic *p becomes Arabic /f/ like in /nafs/ "soul" from *napis^tu...
but I could swear there _is_ "p" in Arabic. At the very least, it should pop
up in foreign words... but then I don't know how it's pronounced. I'm going
to get out an Arabic dictionary and check.
If I recall, Basque is in a similar boat. It has a whole bunch of b-initial
words but when it comes to /p/, it's all foreign.
- gLeN
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