[Lingtyp] allophony of [h] and [ɸ]

[Ian Maddieson]

The simple answer would be that /h/ is acquiring a labial property from a following rounded vowel, but there are a couple of interesting further
issues. Cabecar has three back rounded vowels according to Margery Peña and others; do you also have the percept of [f] before non-high rounded 
vowels? What would a phonetic analysis of perceived [f] vs [h] suggest? — is there more of a gradient variation, or a bimodal distribution?

Ian

> On May 19, 2023, at 13:31, Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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:
>> What is the phonetic motivation for this distribution?
>> 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 <mailto:christianw_lehmann at arcor.de>
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Ian Maddieson

Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
MSC03-2130
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001




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