Guttural consonants in the Telengit language in the comparative aspect (on MRI data)

The paper deals with the somatic parameters of noisy guttural consonant articulations in the Telengit language in comparison with their correspondences in the Ongudai and Ust’-Kan sub-dialects of the Altai-Kizhi dialect. The instrumental data were obtained by magnetic resonance imaging. The contrastive analysis of experimental phonetic data shows the generality of pronunciation patterns of the noisy gutturally consonants in the Telengit language, on the one hand, and in the territorial sub-dialects of the Altai-Kizhi dialect, on the other, and the presence of significant differences. In all idioms compared, the class of guttural consonant phonemes is represented by two rows of implementations following the synharmony relatedness of word forms: (mediolingual-)interlingual(-backlingual) articulations in functionally soft word forms and velar-uvular in hard word forms. At the substance level, in the idioms considered, within each of the articulatory series, significant differences due to the specificity of articulatory-acoustic bases (AAB) of ethnic groups were revealed. If AAB of Ongudays is the closest to the classical ideas about the interlingual and velar-uvular settings, the Telengit manifestants of the phonemes are characterized by some moving forward, while Ust’-Kan consonants are produced with a significant draw back of the language body to the back wall of the pharynx. Ust’-Kan settings, however, are always highly tensed and pharyngealized unlike Telengit and Ongudai representatives that are moderately tensed and nonpharyngealized. The comparison of the tension and pharyngealization of the guttural consonants in these languages indicates their direct correlation: highly tensed consonants are both pharyngealized; moderate tension accompanies the absence of additional pharyngeal articulation. The strong tension and pharyngealization are more productive in the class of guttural consonants, especially their velar-uvular representatives, than in the other local ranks of the consonant settings. In Ust’-Kan sub-dialect can be traced an evident tendency to level out the differences in the articulation of guttural phonemes implementations in soft word forms and hard word forms. The result of the specificity of Ust’-Kan sub-dialect is the erasure of the opposition of the articulatory settings on the criterion of synharmony row and the violation of the algorithms of the manifestation of the Turkic palatal synharmonism, consistently realised in the language of Telengits and in Ongudai sub-dialect of Altai-Kizhi dialect but not supported by articulatory-acoustic base of Ust’-Kan ethnos.

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