glottal stops

[Jules Levin]

At 12:20 PM 4/22/2007, you wrote:

>What I meant by saying that a glottal stop is pure silence is that 
>the stop itself (the closure phase) is silent (by definition). What 
>we hear -- and this is obviously more true for oral plosives -- is 
>the transitions to and from the stop. Based on those transitions, we 
>subconsciously calculate how the silence must have been accomplished 
>-- in other words, the point of articulation.

This is accurate linguistically, but not acoustically.   Just as one 
can hear the click of fingernails on ivory, or ivory on wood when a 
piano is being played, if one is close enough, the articulations that 
make up voiceless stops do produce sound in the oral cavity that can 
in principle be heard, especially by the speaker, if attention is 
paid.  It certainly can be recorded.  Of course, the sound produced 
has no, and can have no linguistic (communicative) function.
Jules Levin

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