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Re: Devoicing of initial consonants

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 23, 2002, 8:37
En réponse à "Y.Penzev" <isaacp@...>:

> Shalom to everybody! > > While looking for material for my Conlang Project-16 (yes, that's a > provisional name for any conlang concept that gets into my mind), I > analysed a bit of Dravidian (Tamil) phonology and liked the idea of a > small > set of consonant phonemes realized in many positional allophonic > variants. > E.g., /k/ is realized as [k], [g] or [x] etc. > So I got an idea to have allophonic richness in P-16.
I had the same idea for Itakian, and am glad to see that there is at least one language which has the same feature :))) . In Itakian, to make it original, not only one phoneme can have many phonetic realisations, but in different dialects these phonetic realisations can be very different (and take different kinds of contexts :)) ) :)) .
> -- > Does any natlang have INITIAL devoicing of consonants? > > The principle can be illustrated like this: > /tun/ [tUn] 'house' -- /itun/ [it"tUn] 'the house' > /dan/ [tan] 'group (of people)' -- /idan/ [i"Dan] 'the group (of > people)' >
I like the idea, I must say. I don't know if any language has it, but it looks a little like English voiceless stops, which are aspirated at the beginning of a word (or is it a syllable?), but not otherwise. It doesn't seem unnaturalistic to me at least :) . Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.