Fricatives (was Re: Hda / Sna)

[Rory M Larson]

John wrote:
>  I can't think of any convenient widely known examples for
> gh!  Like gh in ghage 'to cry' in OP, I guess.

In teach-yourself language books, the example I've seen most
often is German "sagen".  (Accent on first syllable, pronounce
's' as [z], 'a' as [a], 'e' as schwa, 'n' as [n], and go into
doing the 'g' in the middle as [g], except don't quite hit it.
This produces a sound somewhere between [g] and [y].  English
"say" is the same word; we took it all the way to [y].)


> The s/z set is pretty much always written s/z, except in
> languages that change it to th/dh (like Ioway-Otoe), where
> theta and edh become more common.  This is also what underlies
> LaFlesche's use of c-cedilla for both s and z in Omaha
> (and Osage).  Apparently he spoke a variant of Omaha with
> th/dh for s/z.  This is mentioned in once place in Dorsey's
> notes, as characteristic of Frank LaFlesche, and examples
> from Fletcher show it was fairly general in Bikkude
> (a/k/a Village of Make-Believe Whitemen).  Dorsey used
> c-cedilla for theta and LaFlesche seems to have learned this
> from him.

That's interesting.  I've sometimes wondered too if one reason
for LaFlesche's tendency to crunch the voiced and voiceless
fricatives together wasn't related to the situation that
Dorsey notes with a dot or cross under his 's' or 'c' ([s^]).
As far as I can figure out, a properly voiceless sibilant
([s] or [s^]) appearing before a nasal consonant ([n] at least)
or after a nasal vowel ([oN] at least) becomes somewhat voiced.
I think what's happening is that the nasalization bleeds into
the sibilant, so that the air stream goes out the nose.  This
mutes the hissing effect to the point that one might not be
able to hear the sibilant at all without bringing voicing into
that phase as well.  In these situations, it's hard to decide
whether to classify the phoneme as 's' or 'z', 's^' or 'z^'.
An advantage of using c-cedilla is that one doesn't have to
worry about that issue in dealing with [s] and [z].  He does
distinguish [s^] from [z^] however, and I don't know that this
nasal-muting issue involves the velar set of [h^] and [g^],
which he also collapses.

Rory