What is "barred-L"

[Henry Kammler]

OK, my two cents here:

as somebody working with First Nations that try to keep their language alive,
two observations:

lateral fricative is easy to pronounce for most Europeans: the tip of
the tongue
presses against the alveolar ridge (just as continental L), then you breathe
through this (you feel the air at the sides of your tongue!)

Forget about the English velarized L (Ferenc: it is like the Russian "hard" L,
as opposed to the Russian "soft" L), it gives a totally different sound when
you breathe through it because the back of the tongue is raised (that produces
a pharyngeal fricative H)

Also: forget about English TH or - even worse - a combination of L and
TH. TH is
in a way the opposite of "barred L" (or "voiceless L"), as the air passes
through in the middle, and the sides of the tongue are closed.

The reason why I say this is because younger people really struggle with this
when they want to learn their ancestral language and some of them kind of pick
up on the KL or THL "approximations" which then makes it even harder to
get the
sound right.

The KL-sequence heard by many Kinchoochman may have the following background.
When speaking, the tongue touches the alveolar ridge shortly for the barred L,
often its tip flaps back giving it a plucking sound resembling K at the same
time or, especially with old speakers, the back of the tongue touches the soft
palate (where K comes from) first before the tip of the tongue made its way to
the alveolar ridge, so it actually sounds like KL~ ! (this is partly
due to the
generally weaker pronunciation in that age group but also reflects
idiosyncrasies).
To me it seems more logical to mishear the L~ for KL than the TL~. But the
latter is also mostly rendered as KL. Actually older Nootkan speakers tend to
prounce the English CL as TL~, so they don't say CLOCK [klvk] but [tl~ak] when
speaking English. So the correspondence seems to be consistent either way.

Henry K.

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