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Due to a combination of poor hearing, poor audio playback, and lack of training in phonology, I'm having trouble with the lateral affricates.The ones that interest me the most are the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate and the voiceless velar lateral affricate. In particular, the former sounds a lot like a voiceless postalveolar affricate to me. Could someone post a sound file somewhere or link me to a an audio snippet where one or both of these are used? Thanks!

Wikipedia has recordings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless ... _affricate

For the alveolar one, start by saying /l/ and sustain it, and try to make it unvoiced. For the latter, you can think of it as pronouncing a simultaneous /h/. Keep practicing the unvoiced /l/. Once you get the hang of it, you can start varying the force you apply to move it from approximant to fricative. Compare it to /ɹ/ vs. /s/ to feel the difference between an approximant and a fricative in your mouth. Eventually, after enough practice (during which you will sound like a complete idiot, so if you're a self-conscious person, do it in private), you will be able to pronunce a alveolar lateral fricative. This is the first step.

Once you've mastered pronouncing a lateral fricative (avoid making it comically occlusive, there is no need to spit), just add /t/ before it and let simmer.

Now, in order to make a velar lateral affricate, first you'll need to be able to make a velar lateral approximant. This happens by rolling an /l/ along your tongue from the apex to the back of it, so that you touch your soft palate instead with the back of your tongue instead of the alveolar ridge with the tip of it. Just this alone can take a lot of practice. Once you're able to sustain a velar lateral approximant, you can apply the same techniques as you did to the alveolar ones to produce an affricate version.

Once you've mastered these two, retroflex and palatal versions will be easy as π.

Now go practice.

Thanks! I'll start practicing.

I can't do the velar one either, but luckily I don't think it's very common cross-linguistically.

/tɬ/, however, is very common cross-linguistically, just not so much in languages of Europe (I can think of Welsh and Icelandic, little more...) This, as well as varieties such as the ejective one, is more common than many sounds that are common in European languages.

For me, it's easier to just start with a cluster [tl] and then make sure that air flows by the sides of the tongue.

sirdanilot wrote:/tɬ/, however, is very common cross-linguistically, just not so much in languages of Europe (I can think of Welsh and Icelandic, little more...)

Wait, Welsh has /tɬ/? This is news to me and I speak Welsh.

Oh it is just a lateral fricative. Are there no t + ll clusters in Welsh ever?

sirdanilot wrote:Oh it is just a lateral fricative. Are there no t + ll clusters in Welsh ever?

I can't think of a single one. Final /t/ is rare (I think it may be confined to relatively recent loans). Initial /ɬ/ is common enough, but at a morpheme boundary it normally lenites to /l/, e.g. bodd + llawn = bodlon.