Re: Devoicing of initial consonants

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

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