Abstract:

While Arabic gutturals comprise of laryngeals, pharyngeals, uvulars, and emphatics, Salish gutturals do not include laryngeals. To see if the pharynx could be the articulator that unites gutturals, an endoscopic experiment was conducted on a native speaker of Arabic. The pharyneal movement was videotaped while the subject repeated nonwords that had a plain or a guttural sound in the context of ?aCa. The result is that there is a significant difference in the pharyngeal width between the plain sounds and the pharyngeal, emphatic, and uvular sounds. As for the laryngeals, they showed no constriction in the pharynx. This result could explain why Salish laryngeals do not pattern with other gutturals, but it does not explain why Arabic laryngeals pattern with the rest of the gutturals. Hence, an acoustic analysis of the voice of four native speakers of Arabic saying the same nonwords that were used above revealed that the midpoint steady state of the second low vowel has a higher F1 in all of the guttural sounds, including the laryngeals, than the F1 of the plain sounds. This means that in Arabic (unlike Salish), the guttural natural class is better explained acoustically than articulatorily.