[ExI] Rule of Law or of Men?

[Ben Zaiboc]

Henry Rivera <hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu> explained:
> 
> I'm not sure how many of you are being serious about the
> medial labial
> reference, but in the event that someone out there is
> confused about the
> meaning, I'll clear it up. I learned this in a linguistics
> class in college
> and probably haven't used it since. Labial refers to the
> oral place of
> articulation in phonetics. Others are 1. Exo-labial, 2.
> Endo-labial, 3.
> Dental, 4. Alveolar, 5. Post-alveolar, 6. Pre-palatal, 7.
> Palatal, 8.
> Velar, 9. Uvular, 10. Pharyngeal, 11. Glottal, 12.
> Epiglottal, 13. Radical,
> 14. Postero-dorsal, 15. Antero-dorsal, 16. Laminal, 17.
> Apical, 18.
> Sub-apical. In practice, one  combines that with the
> manner of articulation
> to describe sounds such as labiodental fricative, which is
> the "f" sound in
> the word foxtrot, and labiodental nasal, which is the "m"
> sound in the name
> Mike. In the context of the evolution of the word woman, I
> think the text
> is referring to the consonants literally in the middle of
> the word "werman"
> merging, which is confusing because at first I thought it
> was referring to
> a specialized category of the labial place of articulation.
> However, those
> are limited to Bilabial, Labial-velar, Labial-coronal,
> Labiodental, and
> Dentolabial. There is no medial-labial.
> *
> *You may now resume the innuendo, which I am thoroughly
> enjoying. ;-)


Daaaang, and I thought it was all about some vestigial lady-part, a bit like the nictitating membrane of the eye.

Does this mean we can all stop looking for it now?

Ben Zaiboc