I have been wondering about the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (“ll” in Welsh), and this article prompted me to finally take a look. I found that there is a considerably longer list of languages that use this sound than just Welsh and Navajo, and I was surprised to find that it included two dialects of Chinese, one example of which is a word I know in Mandarin and Cantonese starting with an “s” sound: san/sam, which means three. According to the Wikipedia article, they say it more like “llam” in one regional dialect.
There are also examples from a variety of Native American languages, including Navajo, Creek and Chipawaya, as well as a wide variety of other languages from different parts of the world, such as Zulu, Mongolian, Hebrew (biblical), Hmong, Faroese… It really is quite an interesting list. Thanks for posting and giving me the impetus to finally follow my curiosity on this point!
Interesting – I’d recently come across it in Greenlandic, when I was trying to check that I’d remembered correctly that the Welsh for ‘Greenland’ was Yr Ynys Las. As proper nouns often aren’t in dictionaries, a thing I sometimes do for that sort of query is to look it up on Wikipedia, and then swap languages to Welsh – so I looked up Greenland and noticed a ɬ in the transcription of the name in the English article
…And in honour of Aran and Catrin’s holiday, I was tickled when I found out that the Greek word for ‘island’ (το νησί - to nisi - as in ‘Polynesia’, ‘Micronesia’, ‘Peloponnese’ etc.) is the same as Welsh ynys (Irish inis etc.)
