What is "barred-L"

[Francisc Czobor]

Klahowya / LaXayEm !

As I promissed, I start now with my (silly? stupid?) questions.
My first questions is about the "barred-L" sound, found in the PNW Native
languages and also in Chinook Wawa (at least in its form spoken by Natives).
The usual description of this sound is "a voiceless lateral fricative".
This means that it should be something similar to Welsh "ll" or to
Tibetan "lh" (as in Lhasa). But this being the case, how could such a sound
be aproximated by non-Natives as "kl" or "tl" ? It could be rather
approximated as an "aspirated" l sound (i.e. a l+h or h+l combination; for
instance, in the Tibetan loanwords into Mongolian, the Tibetan "lh", in
fact a voiceless lateral fricative, is approximated as lX, as in Tibetan
lhag-pa > Mongolian lXagva "Wednesday").
This is my question. But I'm aware that the most accurate description of a
sound is less worth than actually hearing it pronounced, but unfortunately
there is no Chinook Wawa speaking fellow here in Romania.
But I noticed in the same tame that in non-Native CW, kl/tl is not only for
the "barred-L", but also for the corresponding affricate (tL or its
glottalized variant: tL'). The approximation of this affricate as "tl" is
understandable, and the transformation tl>kl is explainable by
dissimilation; a similar dissimilation occured also during the transition
from archaical to classical Latin (e.g. potlom > *poclom > poculum "cup")
or, later, in the Slavic and Hungarian loanwords into Romanian (e.g.
Hungarian hitlen "faithless, disloyal"> old Romanian hitlean,
hiclean "roguish, perfidious, insidious" > modern Romanian viclean "artful,
wily, tricky"). Thus, if tL> tl > kl is perfectly explainable, how was
possible L>tl/kl ?

hayash mersi,
Francisc

To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!