Voiceless lateral fricative

[Henry Kammler]

Lu$ san,

of course it is true what Dave says, the broadth of minimal phonetic variation
within a phoneme (or its representation as a grapheme) is almost unlimited. So
the barred L-sound can have the closure somewhere between the back of
the upper
front teeth (position of TH) and the middle of the palate (position of
retroflex
SH), its still basically the same, only the pitch is getting lower as you move
back. English TH, as Henry Z. mentioned, can be didactically useful to
illustrate the difference between a stop and a continuant and between
fricative
and nonfricative, no doubt about that.

When Dave mentioned Mobilian Jargon it came to my mind that obviously the same
sound is rendered differently depending on the recorders' mother tongue.
Germans usually hear the barred L as SH (š) when first confronted with it,
English speakers may tend to TH. The area of Mobilian was exposed to Spanish
and French colonizers before the Lousiana purchase, this might explain the
rendering of barred L as /s/ or /sl/ (would be very logical for Spanish
because
the TH-sound prominent in Castilian Spanish did not make it to America
and there
is no SH).

Henry K.

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