From: Torsten
Message: 66825
Date: 2010-10-29
>Thanks for a decent job, Brian. I decided to yank my posting since it dawned on me that the matter was more complicated than I thought at first, also that Sean's use of '>' wasn't that ambiguous, and further that I didn't feel strongly enough about the subject matter to want to start yet another feud.
> 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/ ??' [sqÉllú] "tale"' with -ll- and
> > /?"lËlátÍ¡s/ ??' [?"ÉlËlátÍ¡s] "red raspberry".
>
> > I don't know what -ll- or -lËl- 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
> /Ël/, 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, laqâï«m âhe buriedâ, 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 pâï«lliïïtï"tï"â âturned
> overâ. 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