Re: Azurian phonology

Lárus Finsson skrifaði:
> Den 20. okt. 2008 kl. 13.48 skreiv Benct Philip
> Jonsson:
>
>> but I daresay that there is no Swedish or
>> Norwegian dialect where post-pausal and utterance-
>> initial lenes are fully voiced;
>
> I would assume that by "post-pausal" you mean
> either "after the pause between words" or "after
> the pause between sentences", and by "utterance-
> initial" you mean "at the start of a sentence".
> But then I cannot make sense out of your
> statement, as it seems to oppose the evidence I
> have before me.
The thing is that in normal speech there are no
pauses between words or clauses, or for that
matter connected sentences that can be uttered in
one breath. In fact word and sentence 'boundaries'
play a role in normal speech only in as much that
we are psychologically conscious of them and tend
to place our breath pauses at such boundaries --
preferably between two sentences which don't
belong too tightly together in terms of message
content. That's why we notice someone's catching
their breath only if they happen to do it between
two words in a sentence, or even in the middle of
a word. Indeed part of being a good speaker is
knowing where to put one's pauses/breaths. Word
and clause boundaries may exist in grammar and
phonology, but they don't exist in phonetics.

That word boundaries play a part in synchronic and
diacronic rules is due to either stress factors or
to speakers' being psychologically conscious of
them and letting the way words are pronounced
after a pause or after at the beginning of an
utterance influence the way they are pronounced
inside a breath-phrase. This is not always so, as
evidenced by the development of Celtic mutations:
there evidently stress meant everything and word
boundaries nothing! Also people are more aware of
the wordhood of content words than of grammatical
words. That's why grammatical words tend to become
clitics and eventually affixes. Many of them are
also never uttered breath-initially.

One example of such processes is that words from
the pronominal root *þa- now begin with a lenis
sound /d/ or /D/ in all positions in most Germanic
languages, while all other *þ > t (except in High
German where all */T/ > /d/). These words were so
overwhelmingly more common in unstressed clitic
position that th pronunciation with a lenis sound
was perceived as the normal one by kids learning
the languages. Interestingly Faroese has /h/
rather than /t/ in some of theso words (IIRC
þetta > hætta). A generalized [T] > /h/ would be
a nice touch in some Germanic conlang!

>> mind you voiced--voiceless is not in phone_t_ic
>> an absolute opposition but an infinitely
>> variable scale,
>
> This I do not quite get. Voicing can be more or
> less pronounced, but fortisness cannot. There is
> still a simple opposition between lenisness and
> fortisness as far as I can see.
Sure, in phonetic terms there either is vocal
chord vibration or there isn't, but the
variability in phonological identity of phones
around the middle of the VOT scale is exactly why
lenis and fortis make more sense than voiced and
voiceless as phonological terms when speaking of
Germanic languages other than Dutch, which really
has a voicing contrast 'voiced' and 'voiceless'
are simply not relevant properties of stops in
these languages; that we still use the terms is
due to tradition and influenced by the fact that
the letters we uso for fortes and lenes
respectively are used for voiced and voiceless
stops in Romance languages. The fact that our
lenes **are** voiced **in certain context** of
course plays a role for the traditional
terminology and the way the originally Romance
letters are used in writing our languages.

The breaking point between lenisness and
fortisness as **phonological** properties is
subjectively variable due to phonetic context and
due to language, dialect and idiolect, dependent
on phonetic context and the amount of channel
noise etc. As I explained it is the case that a
phone which is considered lenis if coming after a
pause may be considered fortis if standing between
two voiced sounds (vowels or sonorants) in the
middle of an utterance. It also depends on
language: a speaker of American English may
consider a 50% voiced sound voiceless, while a
speaker of some British English accents may
consider it voiced.

Contrast this with e.g. Hindi where stop phones
in the lower 3/7 of the VOT scale are
unquestionably voiced, phones in the upper 1/7
are unquestionably aspirated and those inbetween
are unquestionably voiceless. Moreover there is
not much 'sliding' due to context, but all
phonologically voiced stops are near the fully
voiced end of the VOT scale and all
phonologically voiceless unaspirated stops are
around 5/7. To the extent that phonologically
voiced stops are slightly less voiced at the
beginning of an utterance this is because voice
needs a few milliseconds to gain momentum.

>> with the opposition rather is in terms of
>> relative distance between fortes and lenes in
>> similar phonetic environments.
>
> Rather than in terms of lenisness?
Rather than in terms of the presence/absence
of voicing.

>> Phoneticians speak of Voice Onset Time (VOT)
>> with fully voiced at one end of the scale and
>> heavdly aspirated at the other.
>
> How do they speak of the aspirated voiced
> stops, then?
As "breathy voice" (also called "murmured voice",
"soughing", or "susurration"), a phonation in
which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in
normal (modal) voicing, but are held further
apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes
between them.

The term "aspirated voiced stop" makes sense only
in a language like Sanskrit or Hindi where there
is a four-way contrast

|   t   d
|
|   th  dh

but this interpretation of the phonology may have
been slightly artificial even in Sanskrit since
the patterns of assimilation are different: when a
voiced and a voiceless stop collide the voiced
stop becomes voiceless (/bt/ > [pt] and /bth/ >
[pt_h]) but when a voiceless and a 'voiced
aspirated' stop collide the voiceless stop becomes
breathy-voiced (/pdh/ > [b_h\d_h\] /dht/ >
[d_h\d_h\], e.g. _buddha_ < _budh+ta_). There are
languages which have breathy-voiced vowels as a
phonological category while phonologically
whispered vowels are extremely rare, so that
voiced and voiceless aspiration certainly aren't
the same thing phonetically. This too goes to show
how ono mustn't confuse phonology with phonetics.
You should use phonetics when doing phonology but
not the other way around.

> The rest of your message I think I can get
> somehow if I study it carefully, which I do not
> have the time for now.
>
> I must say phoneticians seem to be really fond
> of Latin, which I am not. Phonetics to me is
> rather a bit of a wild, unmapped forest. Perhaps
> I'll find my way through it some time.
I think it's not only phoneticians, but any
academic dicipline which wasn't newfangled in the
last few decades, but back when everyone in middle
education studied at least some Latin. Just look
at medical and botanical/zoological Latin! :-) I'm
just undergoing some major oral reconditioning and
have occasion to wonder why phoneticians' and
dentists' Latin terminology for dental anatomy
differs slightly.

>> More seriously we know that in any slavery
>> society the laves outnumber the masters, and on
>> Iceland in viking times most slaves came from
>> Ireland and Scotland...
>
> Yes, indeed. And the plosive contrast isn't the
> only thing they brought with them either. Well,
> i have to consider further what I have to do
> with my Azurian stops. There were Gaelic
> settlers in the south, but this is away from the
> main Azurian speaking area. However there is no
> reason to think that this area would be empty of
> Gaelic-speaking thralls. Perhaps the Gaelic-
> style contrast should be a coastal feature, like
> it is (approximately) in Norway.
More likely it is a feature of those areas
closest to Gaelic-speaking areas. IF these are
away from the coast there's no reason it should
be a coastal feature.

On 2008-10-19 Lars Finsen wrote:
> the thing is that Azurian does need a way to
> distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops as
> well as between aspirated and unaspirated
> unvoiced ones,
Given the conhistorical context it would make
sense if the voiced stops were written with <b d
g> plus some diacritic, like the crossbar <Æ€
ð/đ ǥ> or the overdot <ḃ ḋ ġ> or even <bh
dh gh> -- i.e. like Norse or gaelic voiced
fricatives. Essentially we are dealing here with
two different ways of realizing the most sonorous
sound in a three-way opposition: Norse and Gaelic
happen to additionally fricativize their voiced
obstruents; Azurian doesn't.

> The name was coined in 1482 by the mining
> overseer Morten Thomsen for the blueness of the
> soils he often encountered, and gained
> popularity until it was first used in an
> official document in 1525.
So colloquially it may become whatever Old Norse
_Bláland_ would become! :-) (_Bloalant_?) It
might make sense if the mining overseer were a
Romance immigrant. Thi s would be before the
Reformation anyway.


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
 à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
 ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
 c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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