Deinonysus wrote:I may be a bit ahead of the game so no pressure to anyone who hasn't started reading, but I've spent a very little bit of time studying isiXhosa and I've also read up on the languages of southern Africa, so I have a few thoughts on chapter 2. [...]
Thanks for all this great information, Deinonysus!
Chapter 2 introduces a lot of sounds that will be new for many people, and I think it helps to hear about languages that use them, so that even if the sounds are unfamiliar, they're grounded in the real world and not just theoretical. So cool that languages like isiXhosa and isiZulu have all four kinds of stops. I'd really like to try learning one of them someday.
Deinonysus wrote:He also references the 'Bushman' and 'Hottentot' languages. These are outdated and potentially offensive terms that refer to 'Khoi-San' languages. That itself is actually a bit of a kitchen-sink grouping that consists of at least three separate language families and two isolates.
Thanks for mentioning this. It definitely sounds like both those terms should be avoided.
And I didn't realize that "Khoi-San" is such a catch-all term. And it sounds like "San" on its own is something of a catch-all term too. Very interesting to read on Wikipedia about these groupings and the different communities and languages that are included in them.
Deinonysus wrote:tangleweeds wrote:I was reading along happily last night, doing all the exercises, until I got to 2.4 Glottalic Initation and I hit a wall, where couldn't figure out what I needed to be doing. So I'm guessing this isn't anything I would normally be doing speaking English? I'm going to come back to it during my next quiet analog period, maybe late tonight or tomorrow, and try again. I might have just been tired, having smoothly sailed through everything prior to that.
There are certainly no ejectives in English, that is correct.
You may find this thread helpful:
Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?In fact I think that thread was jonm's inspiration for creating this very study group.
It was indeed!
tangleweeds, glad to hear about the happy reading up to that point, and it makes perfect sense that section 2.4 is where things seem to suddenly get more challenging. I imagine other people will feel that way too. Because up to that point, we're working with sounds that exist in English, even if we're doing unusual things with them: breaking them into the basic components of initiation and articulation, or inhaling instead of exhaling. But then sections 2.4 and 2.5 are about ways of initiating airflow that don't involve the lungs, and for many people that will be totally new.
So please don't worry! We can definitely give these sections some attention and kind of troubleshoot them. I'll try to post a follow-up to this soon, and please let us know if there's a particular sticking point.
Definitely a good idea to check out the thread on ejectives, and it might help to take this section slower than the previous ones and to circle back to previous experiments if necessary. I'm thinking in particular about how, if it doesn't feel like ejectives are coming together in experiment 13, it could help to revisit experiments 11 and 12.
And I'll just mention, these are some of the more challenging sections in the book. It won't just stay this challenging from here on out.
And while I think these sections will be well worth the effort even for people who aren't studying languages that have these sounds, that doesn't mean that everything that follows depends on totally mastering this part. It definitely doesn't. I think you learn a lot just from trying all the experiments, even if some things still end up feeling a little difficult.
Anyway, I think this is a place where reading and discussing as a group will be very helpful.
galaxyrocker wrote:So, randomly interjecting into this thread (though I've been lurking and might pick up the book on payday), but I actually do use [k'] in my idiolect for word final /k/. Though I realize it's not standard and is something fairly unique to me, I just thought it was interesting to mention here.
Hi galaxyrocker, random interjections very welcome!
And of course if you decide to pick up the book, that would be very welcome too. Interesting to hear that you do this with word-final /k/. So it's definitely an ejective, with the glottis closed? I ask because some English speakers release word-final stops with a small puff of air but with the glottis open. But I can imagine an idiolect where word-final /k/ is realized as an ejective [k'], and actually, I think I might do it on occasion. And is it only on word-final /k/ and not word-final /t/ or /p/?