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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:
Like Professor Lawler, I recommend Catford for his clear techniques for learning to make sounds that don't occur in English.

When phoneticians talk about ingressive airstream mechanisms, they are not talking about inhaling but about other ways of causing air to move into the month. The two ways languages do this are with glottalic ingressive and velaric ingressive airstreams. Implosives use the glottalic ingressive airstream mechanism. You can actually hear ingressives in the US. Many varieties of Southern American English uses implosives for voiced stops initially in stressed syllables. If you listen to country singers on The Nashville Channel, you will very likely hear implosive stops. Other varieties of American English may use implosives for emphasis. Carl Sagan was noted for this when he would exclaim about "billions and billions" of galaxies.

The mechanism is this. First, close the glottis, as you do in the silence in the middle of "huh-uh." Second, close your lips to form a [b] sound. Then drop your glottis down. If oyu have a discernible Adam's apple, you can do this in front of a mirror and see it drop. Then release the closure at your lips and say "bah."

You may hear some odd sounding voicing as you practice this because as you abruptly lower your glottis, you build up pressure below it, and air will leak through, causing this voicing. Because of this leakage from below, the air in the mouth doesn't actually rarify much, if at all. Rather, the distinctive sound of the implosive is due to the effect of the expanded pharyngeal (throat) cavity, caused lowering the glottis, so "implosive" is a misleading term. However, it's likely to stick around for a while; it's well entrenched in the field.

The sound takes practice, but you should be able to produce it fairly quickly. To hear implosives, go to

http://www.ladefogeds.com/course/chapter6/exercises/ex%20s.html

where you can click on an implosive and hear Peter Ladefoged pronounce it. Peter, who died in 2006 at the age of 80, was probably the greatest phonetician of our time.

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