Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, dirk elzinga wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Danny Wier wrote:
> >
> > Truly dumb question, what's a geminate?  They were discussed at some
> > point on this list (since I joined) and, as usual, I missed the definition.
>
> Hoo boy. They were discussed, yes, but there are at least two
> definitions floating around out there. The first (and apparently
> most common) is that a geminate is a "long" consonant. An
> example: the /n/ in 'penny' is short, while the /n/ in 'pen
> knife' is long. The long /n/ of 'pen knife' is a geminate.
Oh, I see.  :-p

> The definition which I use in my work overlaps considerably with
> this one for all practical purposes, but it isn't the same. For
> a consonant to be geminate has to do with a property of its
> phonological representation irrespective of  how it's
> pronounced. So you could possibly have a geminate consonant that
> isn't long, or a long consonant that isn't a geminate; though
> neither of these seem to happen very often. But I seem to be in
> the minority on this one, so I will concede to the popular usage
> of geminate = long on this list.
(rueful look)  I'm already lost, I'm afraid.

> However, what Danny is referring to is a particular romanization
> scheme for Korean in which tense consonants are written as
> doubled consonants. I don't know if they are really longer in
> their articulation than the plain or aspirated series, though,
> so I can't comment on the suitability of substituting a long
> pronunciation for the tense consonants.
If anything, I'd say that the aspirated series sounds slightly longer
than the other two series, and the tensed consonants don't do anything
like "pen knife."  Consonants can get tensified in certain contexts but
that's one of the many sound change things--mutations?--that happens in
Korean and doesn't affect things like, oh, ppajuda ("to fall out of") vs.
pajuda ("to see through," as in "I'll see you through this disaster") vs.
(I *think*) p'ajuda ("to be able to sell to").

My best guess for the Romanization--which is practically the only one
I've ever seen used, though there is theoretically the Yale system
floating around as well--is that they were running out of ways to
represent consonants.  The Romanization for aspirates uses the apostrophe
instead of something like "h," maybe because things like "ph" and "th"
are going to be pronounced [f] and [T] instead of [p_h] and [t_h] by your
average English-speaking GI, and after using unmodified stop-letters for
the unaspirated series...I can't think of a whole lot of alternatives
myself.  (The Slightly Older Romanization already sucked in its use of
haceks for several Korean vowels, as far as typing goes; and the digraphs
are ugly, but there just aren't enough English vowel letters.)

YHL