Lateral consonant

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Palatograms of lateral [ l ] and central [ t ]

A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English L, as in Larry. Lateral consonants contrast with central consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.

Contents

For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum (see alveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids, but lateral fricatives and affricates are also common in some parts of the world. Some languages, such as the Iwaidja and Ilgar languages of Australia, have lateral flaps, and others, such as the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Africa, have lateral clicks.

When pronouncing the labiodental fricatives [f]and[v], the lip blocks the airflow in the centre of the vocal tract, so the airstream proceeds along the sides instead. Nevertheless, they are not considered lateral consonants because the airflow never goes over the side of the tongue. No known language makes a distinction between lateral and non-lateral labiodentals. Plosives are never lateral, but they may have lateral release. Nasals are never lateral either, but some languages have lateral nasal clicks. For consonants articulated in the throat (laryngeals), the lateral distinction is not made by any language, although pharyngeal and epiglottal laterals are reportedly possible. [1]

Examples

English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant /l/, which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels (and /j/) as in lady or fly (or value), is called clear l, pronounced as the alveolar lateral approximant [l] with a "neutral" position of the body of the tongue. The other variant, so-called dark l, found before consonants or word-finally, as in bold or tell, is pronounced as the uvularized alveolar lateral approximant [ɫ] with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a [w]- or [ʟ]-like resonance. In some languages, like Albanian, those two sounds are different phonemes. Malsia e Madhe Gheg Albanian and Salamina Arvanitika even have the three-way distinction of laterals /l/, /ʎ/ and /ɫ/. [2] East Slavic languages contrast [ɫ] and [lʲ] but do not have [l].

In many British accents (e.g. Cockney), dark [ɫ] may undergo vocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns tell into [tɛɰ], as must have happened with talk[tɔːk] or walk[wɔːk] at some stage. A similar process happened during the development of many other languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Old French, and Polish, in all three of these resulting in voiced velar approximant [ɰ] or voiced labio-velar approximant [w], whence Modern French sauce as compared with Spanish salsa, or Polish Wisła (pronounced [viswa]) as compared with English Vistula .

In central and Venice dialects of Venetian, intervocalic /l/ has turned into a semivocalic [e̯], so that the written word ła bała is pronounced [abae̯a]. The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme (it specifically represents not the [e̯] sound but the phoneme that is, in some dialects, [e̯] and, in others, [l]).

Many aboriginal Australian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects of Irish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in many languages of India [ citation needed ] and in some Swedish dialects, and the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/, found in many Native North American languages, Welsh and Zulu. In Adyghe and some Athabaskan languages like Hän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant. Many of these languages also have lateral affricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such as Dahalo and Zulu, but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may be added to the approximant.

Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant. However, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States. For example, Tlingit has /tɬ,tɬʰ,tɬʼ,ɬ,ɬʼ/ but no /l/. [lower-alpha 1] Other examples from the same area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere, Mongolian, Chukchi, and Kabardian.

Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized as lh, as in the name Lhasa.

A uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers of American English. [3]

Pashto has a retroflex lateral flap that becomes voiced retroflex approximant when it is at the end of a syllable and a word.[ citation needed ]

There are a large number of lateral click consonants; 17 occur in !Xóõ.

Lateral trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language. They may be pronounced by initiating [ɬ] or [ɮ] with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to imitate bird calls, and they are a component of Donald Duck talk.

List of laterals

Approximants

Fricatives

Only the alveolar lateral fricatives have dedicated letters in the IPA. However, others appear in the extIPA.

Affricates

Flaps

Ejective

Affricates

Fricatives

Clicks

Ambiguous centrality

The IPA requires sounds to be defined as to centrality, as either central or lateral. However, languages may be ambiguous as to some consonants' laterality. [5] A well-known example is the liquid consonant in Japanese, represented in common transliteration systems as ⟨r⟩, which can be recognized as a (post)alveolar tap /ɾ/, [6] alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/, (post)alveolar lateral approximant /l/, (post)alveolar approximant /ɹ/, [6] voiced retroflex stop /ɖ/, [7] and various less common forms.

Lateralized consonants

A superscript ⟨ˡ⟩ is defined as lateral release.

Consonants may also be pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow. This is well-known from speech pathology with a lateral lisp. However, it also occurs in nondisordered speech in some southern Arabic dialects and possibly some Modern South Arabian languages, which have pharyngealized nonsibilant /ʪ̪ˤ/ and /ʫ̪ˤ/ (simultaneous [θ͜ɬˤ] and [ð͡ɮˤ]) and possibly a sibilant /ʪ/ (simultaneous [s͜ɬ]). Examples are /θˡˤaim/ 'pain' in the dialect of Al-Rubu'ah and /ðˡˤahr/ 'back' and /ðˡˤabʕ/ 'hyena' in Rijal Almaʽa. [8] [9] [10] (Here the ⟨ˡ⟩ indicates simultaneous laterality rather than lateral release.) Biblical Hebrew may have had non-emphatic central-lateral sibilants [ʃ͡ɬ] and [s͜ɬ], while Old Arabic has been analyzed as having the emphatic central–lateral fricatives [θ͜ɬˤ], [ð͡ɮˤ] and [ʃ͡ɬˤ]. [11]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Some older Tlingit speakers have [l], as an allophone of /n/. This can also be analyzed as phonemic /l/ with an allophone [n].

Related Research Articles

Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like and semivowels like and, as well as lateral approximants like.

A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German ; or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh. This turbulent airflow is called frication.

Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African and Native American languages. Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pharyngealization</span> Articulation of consonants or vowels

Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.

In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digraph (orthography)</span> Pair of characters used to write one phoneme

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retroflex consonant</span> Type of consonant articulation

A retroflex, apico-domal, or cacuminalconsonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants—especially in Indology.

In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the active articulator and passive articulator. Standard Spanish ⟨rr⟩ as in perro, for example, is an alveolar trill.

In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. Examples of archetypal nasal sounds include and.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voiceless velar lateral fricative</span> Consonantal sound represented by ⟨𝼄⟩ or ⟨ʟ̝̊⟩ in IPA

The voiceless velar lateral fricative is a rare speech sound. As one element of an affricate, it is found for example in Zulu and Xhosa. However, a simple fricative has only been reported from a few languages in the Caucasus and New Guinea.

Doubly articulated consonants are consonants with two simultaneous primary places of articulation of the same manner. They are a subset of co-articulated consonants. They are to be distinguished from co-articulated consonants with secondary articulation; that is, a second articulation not of the same manner. An example of a doubly articulated consonant is the voiceless labial–velar plosive, which is a and a pronounced simultaneously. On the other hand, the voiceless labialized velar plosive has only a single stop articulation, velar, with a simultaneous approximant-like rounding of the lips. In some dialects of Arabic, the voiceless velar fricative has a simultaneous uvular trill, but this is not considered double articulation either.

Yeyi is a Bantu language spoken by many of the approximately 50,000 Yeyi people along the Okavango River in Namibia and Botswana. Yeyi, influenced by Juu languages, is one of several Bantu languages along the Okavango with clicks. Indeed, it has the largest known inventory of clicks of any Bantu language, with dental, alveolar, palatal, and lateral articulations. Though most of its older speakers prefer Yeyi in normal conversation, it is being gradually phased out in Botswana by a popular move towards Tswana, with Yeyi only being learned by children in a few villages. Yeyi speakers in the Caprivi Strip of north-eastern Namibia, however, retain Yeyi in villages, but may also speak the regional lingua franca, Lozi.

The voiceless velar lateral affricate is a relatively uncommon speech sound found as a phoneme in the Caucasus and as an allophone in several languages of eastern and southern Africa. In strict IPA, it needs to be transcribed with diacritics, but a proper letter exists in extIPA: ⟨k͜𝼄⟩.

The velar lateral ejective affricate is a rare type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨k𝼄ʼ⟩.

Ejective-contour clicks, also called sequential linguo-glottalic consonants, are consonants that transition from a click to an ejective sound, or more precisely, have an audible delay between the front and rear release of the click. All click types have linguo-glottalic variants, which occur as both stops and affricates, and may be voiced. At least a voiceless linguo-glottalic affricate is attested from all Khoisan languages of southern Africa, as well as from the Bantu language Yeyi from the same area, but they are unattested elsewhere.

Wadiyara Koli is an Indo-Aryan language of the Gujarati group. It is spoken by the Wadiyara people, who originate from Wadiyar in Gujarat; many of whom are thought to have migrated to Sindh in the early twentieth century, following the onset of famine. The Wadiyara people are affiliated with the Bhil people and Koli people, but are generally more inclined towards associating themselves with the Koli; they are often regarded as a subgroup of the latter.

Adyghe is a language of the Northwest Caucasian family which, like the other Northwest Caucasian languages, is very rich in consonants, featuring many labialized and ejective consonants. Adyghe is phonologically more complex than Kabardian, having the retroflex consonants and their labialized forms.

References

  1. ↑ Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), p. 191.
  2. ↑ Dedvukaj, Lindon; Ndoci, Rexhina (2023). "Linguistic variation within the Northwestern Gheg Albanian dialect". Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. 8 (1). Linguistic Society of America: 7. doi: 10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5501 ..
  3. ↑ Cruttenden (2014), p. 221.
  4. ↑ Mosonyi & Esteban (2000), pp. 594–661.
  5. ↑ Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, p. 243.
  6. 1 2 Okada, Hideo (1999), "Japanese", in International Phonetic Association, Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–119, ISBN   978-0-52163751-0.
  7. ↑ Arai, Takayuki; Warner, Natasha; Greenberg, Steven (2007), "Analysis of spontaneous Japanese in a multi-language telephone-speech corpus", Acoustical Science and Technology, 28 (1): 46–48, doi : 10.1250/ast.28.46
  8. ↑ Heselwood (2013) Phonetic transcription in theory and practice, p 122–123
  9. ↑ Janet Watson (January 2011). "Lateral fricatives and lateral emphatics in southern Saudi Arabia and Mehri". academia.edu.
  10. ↑ Watson, Janet (January 2013). "Lateral reflexes of Proto-Semitic D and Dh in Al-Rubu'ah dialect, south-west Saudi Arabic: Electropalatographic and acoustic evidence". Nicht Nur mit Engelszungen: Beiträge zur Semitischen Dialektologie: Festschrift für Werner Arnold.
  11. ↑ Potet (2013) Arabic and Persian Loanwords in Tagalog, p. 89 ff.

Sources

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