Bilabials are fun!

[pne]

Remember how a couple of days ago I wrote about Amy's first plosive?

She seems to have mastered it now; today she often said lovely words such as [æbæbæwæwæbæbæbæβæβæbæbæwæbæbæβæβæbæbæwæwæbæbæ]. (Judging by the length of the word, her "native language" is presumably something agglutinative. And with a fairly minimal phonology.) And Stella said she's been talking like that most of the day.

So, mostly [b] (voiced bilabial stop) but also several bilabial approximants and the odd voiced bilabial fricative. Bilabials certainly seem to be her thing. (And I think the vowel is [æ] rather than [a]. You could make a case for it being phonemically /a/, though, I guess.)

That follows the learning pattern she's already shown in a few other things: do something once, then several days later start doing it again, this time consistently.

Tomorrow, [æbæbæbæbæ] ("the world")!

Comments

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

[m] is also bilabial: it's a voiced bilabial nasal. I suppose you mean "bilabial stops", though.

Yeah, something like that. Stops and fricatives, I guess. I'm not much of a linguist.

[β] is a voiced bilabial fricative—a bit like [v], but using both lips rather than with teeth against lips. The lips come close together but don't close completely, allowing air to move between them turbulently. ... So think of blowing out a candle while humming, and you have [β].

When I see how a [v] or [v]-like sound is spelled 'bh' in Gaelic (viz. the name 'Siobhan', usu. pronounced [∫∂'van]), I wonder if the Gaelic sound is (or was?) more of a [β] than a [v]. Curiosity, that's all.

(Probably got the wrong 'a' in there for the Siobhan pron., but I can't be arsed to get a full-tilt IPA thing going here.)