LING 330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Soft Palate, Hard Palate, Airstream Mechanism
Document Summary
Nearly universal (upsid = 99. 1% have bilabial stops) Suggests that there is good linguistic motivation to use these sounds. Labiodental stops: unattested (doesn"t mean they are impossible but it is an extreme challenge in gesture) Upper teeth (dental), alveolar ridge (alveolar), behind (post-alveolar) Many other languages have more than one coronal stop series. Hard palate (palatal), soft palate (velar), behind (uvular) Stops are extremely common because they are the places and manner of articulation that resemble tongue movement when you chew and swallow. So, all or almost all primates are made to be able to pronounce these sounds. Basically the part of your tongue that is vertical in your mouth. Glottal stops (in principle) complete closure at larynx (in reality) usually realized as tightening of vocal folds. Contrastive segments in some languages (arabic, hawaiian, navajo, ) 90% of languages have stops at 3-5 places of articulation.
