RE: Nqwebasaurus, an African ornithomimosaur

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

So many dinosaurs, so little time!

Sound files of complex clicks are available at 
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/6aiarstream.html . For nq, click 
on the chapter for Xhosa, and then click on the word (transcribed in IPA) in 
the line "Voiced velar nasal" and the column "Alveolopalatal".

There is a dinosaur name from Navajo: *Seitaad*. The word séít'áád not only 
contains tones like Chinese words do (in this case the accents indicate high 
tone for all three syllables), but also an ejective consonant; to hear 
ejectives, click on the chapters for Hausa and Lakhota.

Of all the rest, just so much: there is no such thing as a primitive language. 
There could easily be in theory, but there isn't in practice. No known 
language, extant or extinct, has retained an unusually large number of 
putatively ancestral characteristics. Thomas Yazbeck, you often make 
authoritative statements on topics you clearly don't know much about; I 
strongly recommend you spend a lot more time in and around Wikipedia.

Oh, concerning alveolar trills: some people really are anatomically incapable 
of producing them (without surgery). However, you can't automatically make them 
just because you can -- I have great trouble with them, even though I can 
pronounce almost anything else, and even though I do get them right at rare 
occasions. I suppose I'd need more practice. My native trill is uvular. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill