[Lingtyp] allophony of [h] and [ɸ]

[Jess Tauber]

Dunno if relevant, but in my analysis of ideophones in Korean, drawn from
Samuel Martin's dictionary (which uses the Yale Romanization), I've found
that ideophones with initial /h/ split into two setw, one of which patterns
with the labial stops, and the other with the velar stops. A similar split
seems to apply with initial /s/, with one set associating with initial
dental/alveolar stops, and the other with the palatal stops.

Jess Tauber

On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 3:11 PM Christian Lehmann <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> The above allophony is well known from Japanese. My current problem is to
> describe it for Cabecar (Chibchan, Costa Rica). The conditioning context is
> almost the same in these languages: What appears as [ɸ] before [ɯ] (in
> Japanese) or [u] (in Cabecar) is [h] otherwise.
>
> Intuition would suggest that this is an assimilation of what is basically
> an /h/ to the features of the following vowel. However, my phonetics and
> phonology are insufficient to answer the two obvious questions:
>
>    1. What is the phonetic motivation for this distribution?
>    2. Is there a phonological feature shared by [ɸ], on one hand, and
>    both [u] and [ɯ], on the other, which could figure in a formulation of the
>    assimilation?
>
> Let it be said that my phonology was shaped a couple of years ago by
> Chomsky & Halle 1968; so I am prepared to be told that this is of no
> concern anymore and the fruitful approach is entirely different.
> Nevertheless, the two questions may make sense even outside this particular
> framework.
>
> I would be very grateful for help from you phonologists (or anybody else).
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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