Re: Consonant Clusters at the Beginning of Words (I)
Rob Zook 
Thu, 06 Nov 1997 09:44:57 -0600

At 08:42 AM 11/6/97 -0600, Saul wrote:
<snip>
>move on to the following vowel. There's much less time and room with
>something like /tv/. Whether it would come out as [tf] or [dv] -- or
>[t^v] -- depends on how Vulcan handles voice assimilation.

Ahh. I guess when I was playing with it, I was pronouncing it [t^v]
and missing the [^].

>>Then next, I'd like to know how we propose to explain kn, nm or wv?
>>stop+nasel stop, or nasel stop+nasel stop.
>
>Right. That's part II probably. /nm/ may just have to go. And is /wv/ at
>the beginning of a word? Yikes.

Hmmm... you know, I may have made a mistake about /wv/ I cannot find it
now. I may have misread my own writing when I transcribed my email. I bet 
that should have been /vr/ instead. That one does appear at the beggining 
of a word. The /nm/ should have been /mn/.

>>>Except of course, that /qy/ is highly unlikely. It would nearly always
>>>come out as some form of /k/.
>>
>>I need better information on how to say /q/ before I could agree or
>>disagree.
>
>Start with /k/, then start gradually pushing the part of your tongue that
>makes /k/ further back in your mouth to make it. It's probably safe to
>describe it as "as far back as you can go." /q/ is a uvular stop, and
>there's one point further back where one can make a pharyngeal stop before
>one bottoms out at the glottis. But pharyngeal stops are made with a
>different part of the tongue, whereas /k/ and /q/ are made with pretty much
>the same part.

Yup. That /qy/ would be a throat-bender then. Just for that reason alone
we may want to keep it ;-) We can make /qy/ and /whl/ a part of Spock's
family name, maybe with no vowels between them - hows /qywhl'k/ strike
ya'? ;>

Rob Z.
--------------------------------------------------------
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid
by education.
-- Bertrand Russell