Talk:հյ

phonetic value

@RagingPichu is there evidence to interpret adjarian's prose as saying [c] instead of [hʲ]? Hovsepig (talk) 06:50, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

i'm assuming you mean to say [ç]. in my experience hʲ is a phonological device, but it's essentially meaningless phonetically because you can't palatalize [h]: the reason is that [h] as a consonant doesn't exist for most languages (armenian included). to break it down, the sequence [ha] or [hi] really, more narrowly, is actually [å̯a] or [i̯̊i] (that's a non-syllabic voiceless vowel in the front), a disgusting transcription that everyone understands when reading [h]. so this sound is essentially unpalatalizable. in armenian dialects this sound can appear at any position; for example, van dialect has a plural ending -հյտեր, which would be [çtieɹ] in IPA: [hʲ] is not suitable in this position. RagingPichu (talk) 07:57, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

@RagingPichu this is difficult though. you're right that [hʲ] is a hard segment to find cross-linguistically. on wikipedia the closest I found was a convention in Romanian to transcribe an underlying /hi, hj/ as hʲ. yet sadly, i tried finding phonetic work on romanian and they weren't clear on if they thought this segment was phonetically [hʲ]

as for armenian dialects, without direct work on those dialects describing the actual properties of that sound, we're just speculating. i had asked bert vaux and two other armenologists I've worked with, and we all shrugged over knowing what exactly this հյ is supposed to be. Hovsepig (talk) 15:17, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

you're right. adjarian 1901 page 24 treats it as like german ç Hovsepig (talk) 07:01, 15 January 2024 (UTC)