What is "barred-L"

[Francisc Czobor]

Dear Jordan,

I have to confess that actually I never heard pronounced the Welsh "ll" or the Tibetan "lh".
But the description "voiceless lateral fricative" suggests indeed a hissing sound as you describe, and that was also my image of how to articulate it, but such a hissing sound I would never transliterate as "tl" or "kl", that was my problem.
But you're right, if I try to pronounce the word "seaL", the last sound is almost like a "tl".
The "barred-L" is indeed difficult to approximate using only the Roman letters. I've seen in Kerr's "Vocabulary of the Language of Nootka, or King George's Sound" (1778) this sound rendered through combinations of up to 6 letters! (lszthl)

Francisc

Jordan Fink <jordan at riseup.net> wrote:
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

>
		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/chinook/attachments/20050418/eb31106a/attachment.htm>