christian text in nahuatl

[r. joe campbell]

   At the risk of over simplifying, Nahuatl [h] is like English [h] (and
like Caribbean Spanish [h]).  That's one advantage of using [..] -- we're
being literal.
   [h] is characterized mainly by an unobstructed, non-constricted oral
passage.  Say "hot" and you've produced it.
 [more below]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Matthew Montchalin wrote:

> Wait a second, some North American English speakers pronounce their Rs by
> drawing the backmost part of their tongue even farther backwards, even to
> the point  of contacting the uvula, hence its being called a retroflex R.
> Is the Nahuatl h sound similar to that?  (And I have heard some Frisians
> utter their 'ch' sound like that, too.)  So, is the Nahuatl 'h' sound
> produced in the same way, by producing something that is almost a closure
> between the back of the tongue and the uvula?


   I strongly doubt that comparing sound spectrograms of these sounds
would enlighten most people.  The only people that *would* benefit from
the viewing would be people who already had a lot of experience in
articulatory phonetics and its correlations with acoustic phonetics (i.e.,
what you glean from spectrograms).  --And the differences are so gross
that you don't need the help of the acoustic hints.

Best regards,

Joe


>
> Say, do you have a suggestion of a link on the web that has sound
> spectrographs we can view and print out, so we can compare the
> Nahuatl 'h' sound to the American retroflex 'r' sound and some
> other national sounds, like German 'chlor' as opposed to Dutch
> and Frisian 'chlor' sounds?  I hope I am not introducing noise
> into the list, this just makes me wonder a little bit.  I have
> had the benefit of hearing a Nahuatl 'tl' sound from an actual
> speaker a couple years ago, without which benefit I would be
> wondering about it to this day.
>
>
>