At 6:22:32 AM on Wednesday, October 27, 2010, Torsten wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "stlatos" <stlatos@...>
> wrote:
[...]
>> Did you read the page? It shows many examples of words
>> from Montana Salish with l, such as sélis^ (the NAME of
>> the language!!!, compare other Salishan languages like
>> Saanich (sënc^áTën \ sénëc^qën)), sqWëllú 'tale', etc.
> It shows
> /sqllú/ ??' [sqəllú] "tale"' with -ll- and
> /?"lˀlát͡s/ ??' [?"əlˀlát͡s] "red raspberry".
> I don't know what -ll- or -lˀl- stand for in Montana
> Salish orthography,
The first is apparently a sequence of two plain voiced
laterals, the first of which is probably pre-stopped; the
second is a plain voiced lateral followed by a glottalized
voiced lateral.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortography
> but it can't be a simple lateral fricative (ie. /l/),
> since
> 1) according to the text, such a sound does not exist in
> Montana Salish, and
> 2) there is no simple lateral fricative (ie. /l/) in the
> table of Montana Salish phonemes.
Unfortunately, in this case the text is wrong, according to
the very source that it cites. I found the paper 'Phonetic
Structures of Montana Salish' (Flemming, Ladefoged, &
Thomason) on-line, and Table III (Montana Salish consonant
phonemes) has both /l/, an alveolar lateral approximant, and
/ˀl/, a glottalized alveolar lateral approximant. A little
later they say that the lateral approximant and fricative
are prestopped in most environments by most speakers, this
being indicated by a superscript [t] or [d]. 'Depending on
context, the lateral approximant is realized as voiced [dl],
or fricated [tK] or [dK\]. When fricated, it can be
phonetically similar to [K].' ([K] and [K\] are X-SAMPA for
belted-l and l-ezh-ligature; the [t] and [d] are
superscripted.)
Section 3.3 (Laterals) begins as follows:
Montana Salish contrasts four laterals, a voiced lateral,
a voiceless lateral fricative, a glottalized voiced
lateral, and an ejective lateral affricate. We will
consider the first two in this section; glottalized
laterals are described in section 3.4, together with
the other glottalized sonorants, and ejectives are
described in section 3.5. In most environments, the voiced
and voiceless laterals are usually produced with a brief
stop closure or some other gesture that produces a
burst-like transient at the beginning of the lateral.
However, this does not always occur. Figures 11 displays
two utterances of the same word, laq’m ‘he buried’, one
with and the other without a transient associated with the
l.
[...]
Laterals are preceded by an evident stop closure in most
word-internal environments. The context where they are
more consistently produced without an initial stop closure
is the case of the second lateral in a cluster of
laterals. Note that such clusters are possible because
similar sonorants are not separated by a schwa. Even here
there is sometimes a burst between the two consonants, as
illustrated in Figure 12, which shows the sequence of
consonants in the middle of the word p’llitt’ ‘turned
over’. The first of these two laterals has a stop closure
preceding it, and a burst as this closure is released. The
second lateral has no such closure, but there is a
transient in the spectrum, closely resembling that
produced by the release of a stop. How this transient is
produced is not clear to us at the moment. Such
discontinuities suggest that, in these cases at least, the
sequences are truly clusters of identical consonants
rather than long consonants.
[...]
>>> I don't have a belief. I quoted Wikipedia.
>> There's no reason to quote it, believe it, use it as
>> evidence, etc.
> Why not?
Some people have an irrationally extreme distrust of
Wikipedia. They fail to recognize that although its
strengths and weaknesses are quite different from those of a
traditional encyclopedia, its overall reliability is roughly
comparable, and in some areas it's superior. Of course it's
not authoritative, but neither is any other encyclopedia:
they're all just starting points.
Brian