Recent laryngoscopic observations suggest that renewed discussion of pharyngeal articulations is warranted. The discussion involves issues of place of articulation — the nature of the category “epiglottal” — and of manner of articulation — whether pharyngeal manners of articulation go beyond approximant and fricative to include trill and stop. In essence, the question is still the old one of how those sounds which are labelled auditorily as “pharyngeal” are produced. The observations reported here suggest that “epiglottal” articulations can be treated as a category of pharyngeal manners of articulation; and that manners of pharyngeal articulation are more closely parallel to uvular manners of articulation than previously assumed. The nature of pharyngeal approximants and pharyngeal fricatives is reexamined, evidence of trilling accompanying friction is presented, and the nature of the pharyngeal (epiglottal) stop is described. It is suggested that all four of these categories share a common place of articulation, and that they can best be described as differing in manner of articulation. The motivation for elaborating the phonetic detail of these distinctions is to facilitate a more precise description of phonemes that have been identified as pharyngeal in the languages of the world, and to provide a clearer explanation of phonetic and phonological processes that may be related to pharyngeal articulations.

Barry (1995a) presents data from Standard German which, among other things, illustrates the two different schwa vowels found in that variety. Barry's acoustic analysis demonstrates that orthographic final ‘-e’ has a regularly closer central vowel than orthographic final ‘-er’, and that the latter normally has no closing r-consonant. Barry, however, did not present data to examine which variety of schwa was found before orthographic ‘-r-’ when the ‘r’ is pronounced (e.g. when an inflectional affix is added to a final ‘-er’ form, as in ‘besser – bessere’).

Labiodental flaps exist in several African languages, and were first described by Doke (1931) in a study of Shona. Westermann and Ward (1933: 76) quote data from Tucker, who notes labiodental flaps in Kreish, a Central Sudanic language of the Sara-Bongo-Baguirmi group. In the same group of languages, Thomas (1981: 262) claims to find them in Bongo-Gberi and in Binga-Kara. Thomas defines these sounds as “vibrantes labiodentales” (see also Caprile 1981: 238). Hoffman (1963) and Ladefoged (1964) both identify these sounds in Margi. Cloarec-Heiss (1981: 225) reports such sounds in Banda, but describes them as “labiodentales lâches”, transcribed [ǔ]. Maddieson (1984) quotes two sounds of this type in the UPSID data base, one in Margi and the other in Gbeya.

As an extensive study of Hebrew and Arabic has revealed that [ʕ] is an approximant in ordinary speech, and as we have no reason to believe that [ʕ] is different in other languages, we should consider [ʕ] to represent not a fricative but a voiced pharyngeal approximant.