glottal stops

[Alina Israeli]

If you mean that "sound produced" = glottal stop "can have no  
linguistic (communicative) function" I would have to disagree. The  
"zero" of sound (if it is zero) is in opposition to some other sound,  
thus it would have to carry meaning. So in French we have

les zéros [lezero] vs. les héros [le?ero]
un être [ṏnɛtr] vs. un hêtre [ṏ?ɛtr]

and many other similar examples.

Alina

On Apr 22, 2007, at 5:35 PM, Jules Levin wrote:

> 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



Alina Israeli
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington DC. 20016
(202) 885-2387 	
fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu




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