What is "barred-L"

[Jordan Fink]

I'm sitting right next to a Tibetan who i just asked to say the work
Lhasa. It sounded nothing like the barred-L i learned to say when i was
studying Lushootcid. I would say that the best way to discribe it is
putting your tounge straight up and making a hissing sound.

When you do this and say words like SeaL(barredL) you understand why it is
often written Seatle. It almost sounds like tl.

-jordan

> 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
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>


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