Re: Azurian phonology

Both Icelandic and Faroese have an aspiration
contrast rather than a voicing contrast, as does
Danish.  It is disputable whether there was a
shift from a true voiced--voiceless contrast
since even in Swedish and Norwegian
accents rather have a fortis vs. lenis stop
opposition with lenis stops realizad as fully
voiced stops only between two vowels or a
vowel and a nasal or liquid.  In the same position
fortis stops are voiceless unaspirated.  Elsewhere
fortes are voiceless aspirated and lenes are
voiceless aspirated, though usually still
more weakly articulated than intervocalic fortes.
One interesting discrepancy is that while
intervocalic lenis geminates are voiced
fortis geminates in the same position
-- and of course after /s/ -- are
usually aspirated!  Even preaspiration is
found in that in some accents any -- not only
geminate -- postvocalic aspirated stop can be
realized as weakly preaspirated.  These
alternations are fully automatic, operate
across word boundaries and are usually
unconscious to speakers, but there all the same.
Of course most accents of English have a
similar fortis--lenis system.  OTOH Scots
Gaelic has a system entirely analogous to
that of Icelandic and Faroese.

/BP

Alex Fink skrev:
> On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:46:57 +0200, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
>
>> The Azurian phonology is tentative still, but I think I have brought
>> it up to something that can be used in the relay. A reasonably
>> comprehensive overview is here: http://www.ortygia.no/uriania/
>> azuriansk-gmp-eng.html
>
> I'm quite surprised at the spellings of the stops <ph th kh p t k>, as
> opposed to <p t k b d g> -- certainly nothing of the sort happened in
> Icelandic, despite dating from basically the same time and having analogous
> phonological developments and presumably being under very similar influences
> from nearby orthographies.  (My sources are unclear on whether Faroese
> itself has shifted to an aspiration contrast.)  What's the conhistoric story
> there?
>
> I'm also surprised that there's no [tS)_h] to set against the [tS)].  Does
> this echo some Scandinavian feature?
>
> Alex
>

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