View this page "Consonants"

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

I can't get rid of the space after the nasal sign. I guess we'll just
have to live with it. Any problems with the nasal sign on your end?

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/kusaal/web/consonants - or
copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

[Mike]

Good work so far, Ryan. As you can see, I've taken one example from
your list of each possible comparison and placed it in the "chart" of
phone comparisons that we're building. The [b] - [m] one word-finally
is not ideal since one word is a verb and the other is a noun, but it
will have to do for now. Also, for [p] - [b] word-medially, you might
want to check for a minimal pair in analogous rather than identical
environments since a pair in the latter does not seem to exist in the
data we have at the moment.

I'm having the same trouble with the space after the nasal sign too.
It's part of the font formatting, I think. If I do it in Word, I can
get the tilde over the vowel, but when I try to copy and paste onto
this page, it still comes out with a space after it. I notice that
some of the fonts in Word have symbols for nasalized vowels (and they
can be inserted here without a space after them), but they're limited
to the regular Latin letter vowels like 'e', 'i', 'o', and 'u', and
don't include the Greek forms like epsilon, etc. that are part of the
IPA chart. It would be great if we knew a more technical person who
could tell us how to overcome this. For the moment, you'll notice
that I've avoided using examples that feature nasal vowels :) Won't
work forever, though.

Hope you don't mind that I've removed your minimal pair lists to keep
the Consonants page cleaner. But I've put them on a separate page so
people can still refer to them if necessary.

[Mike]

Hey folks, we're making progress on analysis. A big thanks to Ryan so
far. Have a look. If you have any comments or suggestions, please
let us know.

Mike

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

I think all the aspirated sounds are in free variation due to their
low frequency and the phonetic environments that I looked at so far,
but I'll get down to really comparing the data later. It just appears
that way for now from what I've seen while looking at other minimal
pairs. I'm pretty sure nasality is contrastive for vowels as well.
I'll throw it together tonight or tomorrow.

[Mike]

I would agree with you, Ryan. It looks like all the aspirated
plosives appear only word-finally. However, unaspirated plosives also
occur word-finally, so it's probably just free variation like you
said, explained by the fact that word-final plosives are easily
expressed with an accompanying puff of air (we do it in English all
the time). Had they occured word-medially, it would require more
effort (depending on the environment) and I'd be more suspicious of
potential contrast.

I believe you're right about the vowels and nasality too, though I've
not done much work on them yet. A few can be explained by the fact
that they're preceded, followed, or surrounded by nasal consonant
sounds, but certainly not all of them.

Were you able to download the sound files I had posted on
HyperFileShare? I left a message about that on your Facebook
account. If not, let me know because I'll have to repost them. Their
server time expired.

On Sep 23, 12:24 am, "Ryan.Lo...@gmail.com" <Ryan.Lo...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think all the aspirated sounds are in free variation due to their
> low frequency and the phonetic environments that I looked at so far,
> but I'll get down to really comparing the data later. It just appears
> that way for now from what I've seen while looking at other minimal
> pairs. I'm pretty sure nasality is contrastive for vowels as well.
> I'll throw it together tonight or tomorrow.
>

> Click onhttp://groups.google.com/group/kusaal/web/consonants- or

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

something interesting with [t] and [d] medially and finally, working
on it now

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/kusaal/web/consonants - or

[Mike]

Thanks for your latest postings, Ryan. You'll notice that I've marked
in red the phone comparisons that are completed. [p] - [b] hasn't
been marked red yet because we still need to check if there is a
minimal pair in analogous environments.

Some of the examples you have for aspirated and unaspirated [t] and
[k] actually appear to support the idea that these phones could be
contrastive. While it's true there are no minimal pairs in identical
environments, there are some in analogous environments. However,
because (1) there are no minimal pairs in identical environments, (2)
aspirated plosives occur only word-finally, something that can be
easily explained as a natural process, and (3) aspirated plosives are
relatively rare, I am inclined to agree that they are in free
variation. If they were contrastive, I'd expect them to occur more
often, and not just word-finally.

What we really need for confirmation is some examples where the same
word is pronounced both with an aspirated plosive word-finally, and
without one. I didn't put alternative pronunciations in the Phonology
Assistant database because it would skew the phone inventory, but I
will check in my Toolbox database. I sometimes included alternate
pronunciations there.

[Mike]

[Mike]

Discussion on [d] and [n] word-medially.

[Mike]

Some miscellaneous comments.

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

Although I'm confident about the allophonic relation between the
glottal stop and [h], I also noticed that only [h] preceded long
vowels while only the glottal stop preceded vowel clusters. I
couldn't think of any phonologically plausible reason to account for
this so I left it out. Does anything come to mind for you?

[Mike]

Comment on new [n] word-medial example.

[Mike]

At Ryan's suggestion, I have separated the segments [kp] and [kw], and
[gb] and [gw] on the Phone Chart, and we'll need to check each of them
for contrast too. I originally listed them together because I jumped
to conclusions based on my knowledge of the agole Kusaal (the other
dialect) orthography, and the fact that I heard some words with those
consonant clusters pronounced both ways, depending on the speaker and
pronunciation speed.

[Mike]

Yikes! After more listening to sound files, I've realized that my
agolé orthography-influenced bias is worse than I thought! I don't
hear the [kp] consonant cluster in any of the words in the Phonology
Assistant database, so am removing it from the phone inventory chart.
And I only hear one incidence of [gb], so have left it in for the time
being.