christian text in nahuatl

Matthew Montchalin mmontcha at oregonvos.net
Wed Sep 4 05:59:06 UTC 2002


On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, r. joe campbell wrote:
|  1. In Northern Spain, the predominant pronunciation is a uvular trill --
|nothing like an English [h].  ""Very raspy""

Wait a second, some North American English speakers pronounce their Rs by
drawing the backmost part of their tongue even farther backwards, even to
the point  of contacting the uvula, hence its being called a retroflex R.
Is the Nahuatl h sound similar to that?  (And I have heard some Frisians
utter their 'ch' sound like that, too.)  So, is the Nahuatl 'h' sound
produced in the same way, by producing something that is almost a closure
between the back of the tongue and the uvula?

Say, do you have a suggestion of a link on the web that has sound
spectrographs we can view and print out, so we can compare the
Nahuatl 'h' sound to the American retroflex 'r' sound and some
other national sounds, like German 'chlor' as opposed to Dutch
and Frisian 'chlor' sounds?  I hope I am not introducing noise
into the list, this just makes me wonder a little bit.  I have
had the benefit of hearing a Nahuatl 'tl' sound from an actual
speaker a couple years ago, without which benefit I would be
wondering about it to this day.



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