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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Implosives b, d, g, j in Swahili
Question:
I just took up some Swahili for fun, and I had never encountered these sounds before.

I more or less can figure out the phonological information around, or at least as long as just taking in air as opposed to expel it. This is what I can do, only that I seem to choke. The books say something like, ''in fact, no air is ingressed, what happens is the glottis pulls down creating sort of a depression...'' Should I ''ingress'' air, if that is the word, or not? Could then be Swahili be viewed as a language where chunks of speech are ''out'' when others are ''in''-ward? Any practical tip you can give us students to come round this issue?

I see on the other hand that some methods simply equal them to the more usual /b,d,g/, such as ''Le swahili sans peine'', with some caveats to not ''affricate'' too much ''j'', and others say ''some speakers''...; Can we just do that and nothing serious happens, phonologically speaking?

Much obliged.

Reply:
Texting on the internet is a rotten way to discuss phonetics. However, if you are in the position of having to study phonetics alone, you need J.C. Catford's wonderful little book A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (Second Edition), from Oxford University Press (ISBN 0199246351). It's full of little experiments you can perform yourself, described very clearly.

There's also a couple pages in David Crystal's indispensible The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Second Edition), from Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0521559677) on various weird double articulations, like ingressive stops, ejective stops, and clicks, with diagrams, descriptions, and examples.

Enjoy.

-John Lawler 

http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ 

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, 

but set fire to him and he's warm for the 

rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett
Reply From: John M. Lawler    click here to access email
Date: Sep-12-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Implosives b, d, g, j in Swahili Herbert Frederic Stahlke    (Sep-12-2009)
  2. Re: Implosives b, d, g, j in Swahili Madalena Cruz-Ferreira    (Sep-12-2009)
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