Talk:Epiglottal consonant

IPA?

I don't see a column for epiglottals in the official IPA chart. How do we have IPA symbols, then? Or is there another publication out there that expands on the chart on their site?

They are included under 'other symbols' because they were historically not considered important enough to warrant a column of their own. The IPA chart used to be even more Euro-centric. It's gotten better, but still isn't quite universal. It would be misleading to leave epiglottals out of the chart as the IPA (association) does when there's no linguistic reason to do so. kwami 05:13, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thank you, that explains it. --CRGreathouse 13:22, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic example wrong

I'm not a linguist and I don't work on articles so I'm not going to change anything, but I suggest taking another look at the Arabic example. There is clearly something wrong and I think the example is flat-out incorrect. I say this because the consonant ع used in the word listed is not an epiglottal fricative but a pharyngeal fricative. Look at the articles for Arabic (section on Sounds) and Pharyngeal Fricative. Also, if you click on the article for Voiced Epiglottal Fricative linked to in the example, the article talks about an entirely different Arabic sound, that of غ (yes they look similar but one has a dot over it). So it's clear that there is a problem or inconsistency somewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.239.64.34 (talk) 19:10, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic's "pharyngeal" fricatives are actually usually epiglottal (which is sometimes still considered a form of pharyngeal), as noted in the Arabic language article. According to the same article غ is velar/uvular, not pharyngeal nor epiglottal, so غرب (here it took me some time to figure out that it actually begins with a غ) should be something like /ʁarb/, which, if I'm hearing the sound file correctly, indeed seems to be the case. This would mean the example in voiced epiglottal fricative is incorrect. I don't know enough to change it, though. --JorisvS (talk) 19:39, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]