Dragaera

Gruntage

Wed Mar 12 20:31:42 PST 2003

Mark A Mandel wrote:
> In any phonetic senxe, "guttural" means 'referring to the throat'. A
> gbguttural sound is one that's made in the throad. (I may have typos in
> this message; I'm getting lousy response time from this ISP.) Examples
> would be English /g, k, ng, h/, and, you might say even more so, Arabic
> or Georgian /q, q'/. None of the sounds people have been describing here
> as "guttural"  are particularly so. I suspect you guys mean something
> like "inarticulate", hm?
> 
> Ah ha. Merriam-Webster OnLine sez:
> 
> 
>>1 : articulated in the throat <guttural sounds>
>>2 : VELAR [that's like /g, k, ng/]
>>3 : being or marked by utterance that is strange, unpleasant, or
> 
> disagreeable
> 
> Were you-all thinking of #3?

I was thinking of a grunt as something articulated in the throat (i.e. 
#1). Thus why I was surprised to find out that "uh-uh" and "uh-huh" 
count as grunts. I don't know if I'm being lulled by some onomatopoeic 
inclination on my part that says grunts should be guttural.

Jose
-- 
Jose Marquez
jhereg69 at earthlink.net