The Western languages do not have uvular consonants. They are velar.

A forum for discussing linguistics or just languages in general.
Locked
VOICE OF REASON
banned
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Dec 2021 10:37

The Western languages do not have uvular consonants. They are velar.

Post by VOICE OF REASON »

The «uvular» rhotic of the French and the German is not uvular. It is velar. It´s not possible that the Western languages have uvular consonants because the Westerners cannot prononce the uvular consonants. If we prononce the rhotic of the French and the German as the true prononciation of the uvular, the Westerners identify that this is «the accent of the other» but it´s not different. The only one evidence that this can prove is that the pretended «uvular» rhotic of the French is in the reality a velar fricative in the speech of the Westerners whom speak solely the French. It must be the same story for the rhotic of the German.
User avatar
WeepingElf
greek
greek
Posts: 531
Joined: 23 Feb 2016 18:42
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Western languages do not have uvular consonants. They are velar.

Post by WeepingElf »

WHAT?

You are making a very bold claim I have never heard before. Truth is that AFAIK, no western European language makes a distinction between velar and uvular consonants (e.g., /k/ vs. /q/), so phonemically they are the same. They are in free variation - if you say [qar] while speaking a western language like English, every westerner will recognize that as /kar/, even if he may feel that the initial /k/ sounds funny. But that does not mean that Western languages do not have uvular phones at all. Some of the dorsal phonemes are, in ordinary speech, phonetically realized as velars, others as uvulars.

And indeed, in my idiolect, onset /r/ is, if I am not mistaken, [ɣ] - a voiced velar fricative. But that is not true of all varieties of German - [ʀ] is more common, and some dialects still have alveolar [r] (prominent examples: Peter Maffay and Franz Müntefering). Also, I am not a phonetician, and my observation about my idiolect may simply be wrong!
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
My conlang pages
User avatar
LinguistCat
sinic
sinic
Posts: 324
Joined: 06 May 2017 07:48

Re: The Western languages do not have uvular consonants. They are velar.

Post by LinguistCat »

WeepingElf wrote: 31 Dec 2021 14:36 WHAT?
WeepingElf, they previously made a whole screed about "Westerners aren't ABLE to pronounce 'non-Western' phonemes" with no evidence either about why or how this would be true, and only a lot of circular reasoning based on nothing. If not a troll, they are a crackpot.
Locked