Talk:Approximant

Voiceless approximant

Hi Nardog, can you elaborate on your reasoning for removing this material at the beginning of the voiceless approximants section? Maybe there's a better place for this information than where I put it, but it seems neither redundant nor POV. What am I missing here? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 19:30, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

@Aeusoes1: Which part are you talking about? That a voiceless labialized velar "approximant" and fricative are not found to contrast is already covered in the subsection "Distinctiveness", cited to Clark & Yallop. "POV" was in reference to the phrase "point out". That said, I can see the part cited to Ohala, which I removed thinking it was covered in "Phonetic characteristics", was not so redundant, so I'm down with restoring it. Is that what you are talking about? Nardog (talk) 19:40, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Ahh, okay. That makes sense. Yes, the thing I would like to see restored is the part cited to Ohala. I figured the beginning of the section was a good place to put it because the status quo sentence is technically uncited, but I'm open to it being elsewhere if you think there's a better place for it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 19:49, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

@Aeusoes1: Well, now that I think about it, I don't believe the source supports the statement. "...making acoustic distinctions between voiceless approximants and voiceless fricatives difficult" presupposes a distinction between voiceless fricatives and approximants, but I don't see it in the text of Ohala. I forgot I had mentioned this on your user talk, but as I said there, "the fricative character of the [ɬ] need not result from its having a narrower channel than the approximant [l] but simply from being [−voice]" implies he would regard a voiceless sound with the same supraglottal configurations as [l] a fricative, not an approximant. I've restored his mention of reduced resistance in "Disagreement over use of the term", but I'm not entirely sure if it's the right place or how it should gel with the content of "Phonetic characteristics". @RoachPeter: Could you enlighten us? (Ohala 2005:276 is what we're talking about here.) Nardog (talk) 21:01, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

@Aeusoes1:@Nardog:The Ohala paper is interesting, being part of the crusade he led tirelessly to make the use of phonetic terminology by phonologists actually physically meaningful, rather than cosmetic. But as far as I can see he's not here really addressing the issue of whether voiceless approximants exist independently of voiceless fricatives. His main point seems to be that the difference between non-obstruent [l] and (as conventionally labelled) obstruent [ɬ] could be explained in simple phonetic (aerodynamic) terms in a way that contemporary phonological theories could not achieve. A discussion of voiceless lateral approximants would, I think, have been relevant at this point but he doesn't seem to mention them, a fact perhaps significant enough to justify keeping this reference in this subsection. Would it be OR or POV to point out that Ohala doesn't invoke voiceless approximants in this argument? Sadly, he died recently so I can't ask him about it. RoachPeter (talk) 11:23, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

@RoachPeter: Thank you for your input. He does say [ɬ] "need not result from its having a narrower channel than the approximant [l] but simply from being [−voice]", so isn't he effectively saying that he would regard a voiceless sound with the same supraglottal configurations as [l] a fricative (unlike Ladefoged & Maddieson)? I was more wondering whether such a sound would have turbulent or laminar airflow (and whether/how his paper comports with what you wrote in "Phonetic characteristics") than whether he admits the concept of voiceless approximants (he doesn't, as far as I can tell from p. 276). Nardog (talk) 14:15, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

@Nardog I agree with your second sentence. I think he was describing a situation in which the airflow when the glottis is opened with a [l] articulation is sufficient to generate turbulence, and hence a consonant of a different manner-of-articulation category (i.e. fricative). To have described a voiceless approximant with laminar flow as a result of opening the glottis (producing simply a different sort of approximant) would not have served the purpose of his argument. I suspect he didn't in general use the category "voiceless approximant" (I haven't found it any of Ohala's papers that I have), but he did have close connections with Ladefoged and his UCLA group. RoachPeter (talk) 15:26, 7 January 2021 (UTC)