Re: Glottal Stop Consonants

(Best viewed with a Thai encoding.)

Peter T. Daniels wrote on Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:30 PM

> Richard Wordingham wrote:

>> Richard:
>> A. Sara a represents a consonant sound, it doesn't combine vertically
>> with
>> other vowels,
>> [Whoops! I should have said 'with consonants', not 'with other vowels']

>> Alone:
>> Could you give me an example of any languages which have this sound and
>> consider it as a consonant?

> It looks like you're not being careful to distinguish speech from writing?

So far it's not been necessary. I got a lot of stick when I remarked that
Thai เล่น 'play' had a short vowel in the context of Thai not always being
able to show both the tone and the vowel length. I had Thais screaming, in
definance of the facts, that the vowel was 'really' long. One needs to
apply a historically explicable rule of thumb to deduce from the spelling
that this word has a short vowel. (We've had similar grief elsewhere from a
Thai for remarking that น้ำ 'water' usually has a long vowel despite its
spelling. That is usually the first irregular spelling pointed out to
learners.) What I'm really looking for by way of reply is examples where
spelling shows a final glottal stop by using a consonant symbol.

> Every "vowel-initial" word in German begins with a glottal stop, but of
> course it isn't written.

Whereas in Thai, every 'vowel-initial _syllable_' starts with a glottal
stop, written as such!

>> Finding clear examples is complicated because Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and
>> Pali don't have glottal stops, and it seems that the original dialect of
>> the
>> Koran didn't have them after vowels. The Arabic alif is therefore rather
>> like Thai อ. Classical Arabic is based on more conservative dialects.

> Do you mean Qur'aninc orthography, or do you mean the Arabic language?

I mean that the Koranic orthography shows a reduction in glottal stops that
is not manifest in the Classical Arabic pronunciation, whence the hamza on
waw and a modified ya to clearly show the Classical Arabic pronunciation.
Hamza's use on initial alif may reinforce this example.

>> The spelling strongly indicates that glottal stops (written with the
>> consonant aleph) were full-blown consonants in the earliest stages of
>> Hebrew
>> and Aramaic, but by the time the vowels were recorded, glottal stops
>> after
>> vowels (but not between vowels) had been absorbed into such vowels,
>> lengthening them. That's how Latin 'a' derives from the letter for a
>> glottal stop, aleph.

> No, Greek alpha is /a/ instead of */'/ because Greek doesn't have /'/

(or the other consonant sounds represented by the Phoenician letters
that were turned into vowel letters).

How about digamma for /w/? Surely you haven't forgotten that 'f', 'u', 'v'
and 'y' all derive from waw? What about the use of he for /e/ and heth for
/h/? Was that because Greek /h/ was [x] at the time and therefore closer to
the sound of he than of heth? I admit I can't think of any argument that
/h/ wasn't [x] at the time. Just how arbitrary was the use of aleph, he and
ayin for /a/, /e/ and /o/ rather than some other pemutation?

>> Alone:
>> For nikkhahit I can accept that it can be a consonant in P/S , but not in
>> Thai.

>> Richard:
>> Interesting. Can you give an example of an argument that works for Thai
>> but
>> not for P/S?

> What's P/S?

Pali/Sanskrit.

Richard.