Voiceless lateral fricative

[David Robertson]

Having noted that "barred L" sounds quite different in various languages,
I suspect that the following is the case.  Tibetan, Tlingit, Chinuk Wawa,
Welsh, et al. each have a sound that's FUNCTIONS as a voiceless L in the
phonology of each language.  The details of its pronunciation are open to
significant variation.

An easy analogy to make is with all the "R" sounds of various languages.
There's no easy way to claim that "R" in French, Italian, English,
Mandarin Chinese, and so forth are the same sound -- but functionally they
can be classed together as "rhotics".  Again, the details of pronunciation
are left to the individual languages.

Similar variation occurs for almost every kind of sound in human
languages.  Plain old "T" and "K", for example, can have quite a range of
pronunciations cross-linguistically.  (Dental vs. alveolar vs. retroflex
T, aspirated/unaspirated, fortis/lenis, more or less voicing,
palatalization, and other parameters can come into play.)

Even a fairly precisely defined sound like the /k'w/ of Chinuk Wawa and
many Pacific Northwest languages can be realized in many different ways:
Some speakers will "pop" it less forcefully than others, some folks will
round their lips less while saying it, some will make it more like
a "front K" or like a "back K", etc.

So, as we've seen, a certain sound in a given language may or may not be a
useful model for pronouncing its equivalent in another language like a
native speaker!

--Dave R

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