Talk:Glottalic consonant

English does not have ejectives

At least, no English I've ever heard. The plosives in star and scar are tenuis (unvoiced, unaspirated); the article wrongly transcribes them as ejective.

Also, this page is linked from the article on hangul, which states that the doubled letters represent glottalic consonants. However, although there's something going on with the glottis, they're neither ejective nor implosive. —kwami 20:28, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

English does have ejective allophones of stops in some positions, or at least mine does. But certainly not in star and scar. I've edited the page to just read "Glottalic sounds can be heard in some allophones of the English language.", which should probably expanded by someone who knows exactly where. --Ptcamn 30 June 2005 21:03 (UTC)

Wow, what dialect do you speak? I didn't know ejectives occurred anywhere in Europe (outside the Caucasus, anyway). Should probably state which dialect (they don't occur in RP or US English, for example), and also that they're ejective, and not just 'glottalic'.

Maybe this is what you mean. From Ladefoged: "stops that occur with an accompanying glottal stop, as in the London English pronunciation of 'rat' as ra7t may have small upward movement of the larynx that make them weakly ejective". kwami 2005 June 30 22:51 (UTC)

I think that (somewhat more prototypical) ejectives can occur in very emphatic, utterance-final positions. Just as Ladefoged says, this is forcing a release of the stop while maintaining the glottal closure. But, this probably depends on the individual & type/degree of emphasis. Anyway, they are definitely not a very frequent realization. peace – ishwar  (speak) 2005 July 2 18:10 (UTC)

I can see that. But with something so dependent on prosody, it might be difficult to convey what we mean. English is a tonal language too if you want to count such things. We have prosodic tone, and that can become distinctive. I remember hearning on the radio in the US that a station sponsor "wants you to have F.U.N.", where the acronym was pronounced just like the word 'fun', except with a high-to-mid falling tone. Bizarre. kwami 2005 July 3 02:04 (UTC)

Maddieson's map at WALS/7 (linked in article) marks Korean as having ejectives. However this contradicts the description in SOWL (which Maddieson co-authored) and at Korean phonology. The latter article goes on to say, “Sometimes the tense consonants are indicated with the apostrophe-like symbol ‹ʼ› symbolising glottalization, as in Americanist phonetic notation. This should not be confused with official IPA, as IPA ‹ʼ› represents the ejective consonants, with their piston-like upward glottal movement and non-pulmonic air pressure, which the Korean tense consonants do not feature.” We need an expert to tell us which is right. Assuming the experts have reached a consensus. — Solo Owl (talk) 22:24, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that I once heard that Glaswegian English (Glasgow/Glaschu) has ejective allophones in free variation with unreleased stops, when word final ("cat", "clap" etc.).

Pronunciation instructions

Wouldn't things like How to pronounce an implosive consonant belong on Wikibooks? --Ptcamn 30 June 2005 21:03 (UTC)

I suppose if you wanted to collect all the phonetics tidbits, that might make a decent book. kwami 2005 June 30 22:51 (UTC)

I think it’s nice that it’s here Anatol Rath (talk) 21:35, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Implosive

I'm trying to follow the instructions to produce the implosive "b". I can produce a kind of "b" sound while breathing in, but how do I transition to breathing _out_ again for the immediately following vowel sound as in "bAAA"? If I continue breathing in for the vowel I make a croaky sound that would be appropriate in a horror movie but I don't think is what is intended. Thanks! Grover cleveland 07:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite needed

I am more confused now than before I read this article.

• Definitions &c. The lead sentence needs to be clarified. I recently came under the impression that ejective, implosive, and pulmonic refer to different airstream mechanisms, and that "glottalic" means ejective or implosive (as opposed to pulmonic), whereas "glottalized" is pulmonic with a secondary articulation involving the larynx. If this is true, fix the sentence. If I am wrong, fix the next paragraph.

• Classification. I am clear that ejective and implosive are 2 types of glottalic consonants. The 3rd and 4th paragraph talk about glottalized consonants as if they are a 3rd type of glottalic consonant. Or are glottalic consonants a type of glottalized consonant (per usage in WALS/7)? You should be clear on which is the subclass.

• The section "Etymology" does not discuss etymology at all. Please rename it. Since the word "glottis" is in the defining lead sentence, no further etymology is needed. Apparently this section is meant to tell us that "glottalic" and "glottalized" are technical terms with significantly different meanings. It is not quite clear on this. It then muddies the waters by treating the latter as a type of the former, after seeming to say it is not.

• The section "Glottalic sounds in languages" is rather vague. Not only is "rare" a weasel word, it is inappropriate here -- 27% of something is not rare! Perhaps the copyright allows us to adapt the WALS/7 map to our purpose here? In any case I will try to rewrite the section based on WALS, with computed percentages.

Hopefully an expert will clarify the definitions of glottalic, glottalized, and glottal in this article (and in the article "Glottalization", which suffers from the same confusion). — Solo Owl (talk) 21:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Distribution in the world's languages

This edit addresses the last bullet in my comment above. I replaced the section "Glottalic sounds in languages" with this one. (My biggest edit ever!) It is probably too long -- Maddieson is even more prolix than I am -- a good writer can try to boil it down to essentials. It may be too wonky and geeky -- I am a map freak and a mathematician.

It is important because it shows a few language universals (actually pseudo-universals, because these are statistical). (1) Phonetic phenomena tend to be distributed by geography, as much as by language family. (2) Complicated consonants occur in a minority of languages, but most likely in languages with many consonants. (3) Glottalized resonants are most likely to occur with ejectives (which may be of interest to those who reconstruct proto-languages). (4) There are exceptions to all such statements. But I do not have sources for all these generalizations.

It is based entirely on a single page on the Web -- is this a violation of Wikipedia's reliable source policy? Or the copyright policy? Anyone who has dead-tree references for the assertions here should add them. The italicized paragraph at the beginning of the section may be unique to Wikipedia; is it un-encyclopedic? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eall Ân Ûle (talk • contribs) 02:25, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone know how Maddieson chose the 566 or 567 languages he surveyed? Are these all the languages that phoneticists have studied? Was an effort made to gather data on languages with exotic sounds (thus biasing the sample)? Or are they just the languages that happen to be in databases he can access? — Solo Owl (talk) 03:03, 19 January 2011 (UTC)