Zompist Bboard Again

What are good romanizations for the (labiodental stops)?

voiceless labiodental stop
IPA: p̪

voiced labiodental stop
IPA: b̪

I'm doing a conlang based on Modern English orthography today and I have lots of background in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English orthographies.

So I'm going with fh and vh.

We have a lot of digraphs (two letters used to write one sound) in English which are letter + h = digraph. I think we got this from Latin who maybe got it from Etruscan. I think the older, more Greek method is to double the letter, which is where F and G came from.

I much prefer doubling letters these days, if anything, but for the sake of this conlang's concept, I'm going with fh and vh. I could go ph and bh but ph already occurs in English orthography a bit and I want to add a bit of a thrill.

I never encountered a language with these sounds as phonemes. Has anyone here? I haven't looked them up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia's always good for that sort of thing.

I can work with all kinds of non-English sounds but I don't like them in my conlangs the last 5 or more years. I like 5 vowels and about as many phonemes as English, or less. Recently, though, it just so happened that the thought of labiodental stops popped into my mind.

I like ȹ and ȸ.

They don't occur for a good reason - they are really hard to distinguish acoustically from the bilabial stops. Give it a go yourself and you'll see what I mean.

<fh> signifies a fricative to me

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:59 am They don't occur for a good reason - they are really hard to distinguish acoustically from the bilabial stops. Give it a go yourself and you'll see what I mean.

They're also impossible to make if you don't have perfect teeth, which many people in ye olden days did not.

<h> is a bad choice with which to Romanize any stop/plosive because the aspirants either are stable, as in English, or become fricatives, as in Ancient Greek. That said, the labiodental stops tend to be Romanized as <p> and <b> because they're relegated to allophonic status for reasons mentioned before.

And still don't (almost all small children and many healthy adults have gaps between their front teeth). However, as long as you permit [pf bv] as acceptable pronunciations, i think true labiodental stops are viable phonemes. Ive used them in just a few languages ... ṗ works great for the voiceless stop and b with underdot for the voiced stop. Apparently the latter is not found in Unicode as a single character but I can type it on my big screen PC using deadkeys.

Also, I've used ph/bh andithink it works perfectly fine as well. Th is used for stops in Australia, India, etc

I would suggest <pf> and <bv>. Ladefoged and Maddieson suggest that in one of the few languages where they do occur, Shubi, there is variation between labiodental stops and German-like bilabial-labiodental affricates, which you don't need perfect teeth to make. (The passage is quoted word for word on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shubi_language )

mèþru wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 6:47 am <fh> signifies a fricative to me

In the languages I am most familiar with which use it (Scottish Gaelic and Irish) it is usually silent but occasionally /h/.

I think we got this from Latin who maybe got it from Etruscan.

Latin used it to represent aspirated stops in Greek and Punic (and perhaps other languages?); English mostly uses it in the same places except that Greek aspirated stops spirantized, which is reflected also in English pronunciations (except of <ch> < CHI*). (We have native <th> to replace <þ ð> when they went out of fashion; native <ch> merely represents the palatalized /k/ from Old English, which became phonemic in Middle English.)

*Why is Greek small letter chi indistinguishable from Latin small letter eks in this board's font?

zyxw59: Thank-you for your reply.

I never heard of these ȹ letters. Thank-you for sharing.

Curlyjimsam: Thank-you for your reply.

Oh, wow! But that does make sense. I've heard things like that of the weird but possible parts of the IPA chart.

letter+h also can be used to just make a digraph, I think. Sh is not a fricative version of s. Otherwise, I got nothing. Ch is not a fricative version of c. Welll ...

Salmoneus: Thank-you for your reply. That's such a clever point you made.

yangfiretiger121: Thank-you for your reply.

Well, I was hoping more for creative Romanizations. Maybe I should have been more specific.

Pabappa: Thank-you for your reply.

anteallach: Thank-you for your reply.

So interesting.

I somewhat feel like I'm wasting your peoples' time though because you all seem so educated and talented. Oh, well, your call.

Zaarin: Thank-you for your reply.

...

What a fun topic. I never encountered a language with these labiodental stops in them. Only someone like Ladefoged, surveying all living languages for their phonologies, would encounter such a thing. This, then, is my forray into such an area of linguistics. Me, I study hieroglyphic writing systems; my joys are otherwise. I do get a kick comparing affricates in Mandarin, Mayan Hieroglyphic, and Old Georgian, though. But that's about it. You can't have it all. Earlier I posted my own unique way of simply pronouncing 1600s Massachusett and no one gave me a pat on the back or anything. Wow, tough crowd, man.

You could use a p and b with a stroke through them like these too.
ᵽ ƀ.

Birdlang, thank-you for your response.

pf and bv