Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Mon Nov 09, 2020 9:06 am Arabic borrowed English "to shoot" (in the context of soccer), some time ago, as present-tense yaʃu:tˤu, past-tense ʃa:tˤa, verbal noun ʃa:tˤ, which hilariously matches both the English inflection and related noun (shoot, he shot, a shot) all while using a perfectly native inflectional pattern found in triconsonantal roots with /w/ as the second consonant (e.g. yaqu:lu 'he speaks', qa:la 'he spoke', which has the root q-w-l).
Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Mon Nov 09, 2020 5:49 pmI should've mentioned those are Standard Arabic phonemes. In phonetic reality they're more like [ˈʃɒːtˠˤɒ] and [ʃɒːtˠˤ].
I think this quote from Mark Cowell's A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic (1964: 6-7), which is one of the best presentations of the "emphatic" consonant contrast in Arabic I've seen, might help:
Basically, secondary articulation is involved, and the whole of the back of the tongue is raised backwards to add constriction and so modulate the sound of the consonant.VELARIZATION1: ṭ, ḍ, ṣ, ẓ, ḍ, ḅ, ṃ, ṇ, ḷ, ṛ, (?).
The dot under these letters represents a "heavy" resonance which is the effect of relatively low-pitched concentrations of acoustic energy — in contrast to the "thin" or "light" quality of the sounds transcribed without the dot. (Note that ḥ [p. 4] is not one of the velarized sounds; its dot is merely to distinguish it from h.)
In producing the plain sounds (i.e. those transcribed without the dot), the tongue is usually arched upward and forward into a single hump (in profile), leaving the pharyngeal and velar passages relatively open. For the velarized sounds, on the other hand, the profile of the tongue usually tends to be two-humped and low in the middle; the back hump narrows the velar and pharyngeal passages.
The lips may also play a part in the produce the heavy resonance; velarization is sometimes accompanied by protrusion and pursing of the lips, while retraction and spreading of the lips help make the lighter, thinner resonance.
Examples of the contrast between plain and velarized sounds:
Plain .......... Velarized
tīn ‘figs’ ..... ṭīn ‘mud’2
[9 more examples omitted]
Speakers of English and many other languages are apt to be more sensitive to the effects of velarization on contiguous vowels than to the differences between plain and velarized consonants themselves. Compare dall ‘to indicate’ with ḍaḷl ‘to remain’, sədd ‘close, block’ with ṣəḍḍ ‘repulse, refuse’. [pp. 10, 11]
Velarization is usually not limited to a single sound in a word, but commonly affects whole syllables and often hwole words: ḍaḷḷ, ṃaḅṣū´ṭ, ẓā´ḅeṭ.
The dental obstruents t/ṭ, d/ḍ, s/ṣ, and z/ẓ are the only ones of these pairs that differentiate many words independently as illustrated above. With the others, the distinction between plain and velarized is usually a variation conditioned by the neighboring sounds, and is potentially significant only next to the vowel a and in the absent of dental obstruents.
Since velarization mainly affects sound sequences that involve dental obstruents, these obstruents are taken as the focal points of velarization wherever possible. Our transcription regularly shows velarization for these sounds, but not for the other kinds of sounds affected in their neighborhood. Thus in the word bə´ṭlaع, for example, the dot under the ‘t’ implies that the b, the ə, and the l are normally also velarized.
This economical use of subscript dots is not unambiguous, since the scope of velarization — the "neighborhood" of a dotted letter — has not been defined, nor is there, apparently, any simple way to define it. In fact the scope of velarization varies considerably from word to word, speaker to speaker, and region to region. Furthermore, the velarization may vary in intensity; some parts of a word may be strongly velarized, other parts weakly.
———
1 The term ‘velarization’ is not altogether satisfactory as a name for this phonological component. Note that the post-velar sounds x, ġ, and q are not inherently "velarized"; they may be either "plain" or "velarized", depending on the neighboring sounds. The term ‘pharyngealization’, which has sometimes been used instead of ‘velarization’, is even more misleading, since the pharyngeal spirants ḥ and ع have still less in common with the velarized sounds than the post-velars have.
Evidently the air-stream turbulence produced by primary velar or pharyngeal stricture has sound effects quite unrelated — in Arabic, at lesat — to the efect of so-called secondary stricture in these passages. The secondary stricture does not produce audible turbulence, but serves to modify the resonating chamber.
The traditional term ‘emphatic’ is also a bad name for the velarized sounds, since it suggests (erroneously, it would seem) that these sounds are more forcefully or tensely articulated than the plain sounds.
2 Velarized ṭ is usually unaspirated while plain t is somewhat aspirated.
As the text says, there's a small element of protruded rounding too, which I tried to render above with the rounded back vowel [ɒ], and which in particularly narrow transcriptions I have on occasion seen rendered as e.g. [tˠˤʷ]. I don't personally perceive this roundedness much, but apparently Swahili speakers do, and you can see this in the way they borrow Arabic words with emphatic consonants using their native /w/ sometimes: swala 'prayer' < Arabic صلاة sˤala (also pronounced sˤalaːt, stressed on the second syllable) 'prayer, Salah/Salat'. Not that Swahili speakers are consistent about it: sadaka 'alms, charity' < Arabic صدقة sˤadaqa, safi 'clean, not dirty' < Arabic صافٍ sˤaːfin (colloquial [ˈsˤɒːfi]) 'pure, clear, bright'.
I have some things to say about the similarly interesting Korean tense consonants, with links to sound samples, but that'll happen in another later post.
