Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of Yoon Ha Lee
> Sent: Sunday, 28 January, 2001 10:19 AM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?
> Nah, I wouldn't do this to you.  But I could possibly give a better
> question if someone would explain what the difference is between /p/ and
> devoiced /b/, because the little phonetics/phonology I've had/have read
> is absolutely no help is figuring it out.  :-/
I'll throw some links your way:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/Phonetic
s_and_Phonology/ (from Yahoo!, but all in English)
I tried a search in Yahoo! Korean but found no links pertaining to
"phonetics and phonolgy". For "Linguistics and Human Languages",
http://kr.dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/
(make sure your OS or browser can read Hangul!)

To me a voiced consonant means that the vocal cords vibrate continually,
while with voiceless consonants, the vocal cords stop while the
lips/tongue/throat closes for the consonant sound. In Korean, the "lax"
consonants are voiced in between vowels. It might take a good bit of
practice.

(I still have trouble with aspirated stops/affricates; my ear hasn't been
trained yet to distinguish aspirated from non-aspirated.)

> I will observe that p, t, c, k sound uncannily like b, d, j, g before
> vowels (though not so much IMHO in the final positions, where p, t, k are
> unreleased; and c in final position becomes unreleased t anyway)--is that
> perhaps the difference between /p/ and devoiced /b/?  But the difference
> between, oh, /t/ in "stop" and Korean unaspirated /t/ seems nonexistent
> or very tiny, and I'm not sure (again) if a devoiced /d/ would come into
> play somewhere....
>
> > > The three Korean grad students in my phonetics class told us
> that fortis
> > > stops were produced by stiffening the vocalis folds so that
> there was no
> > > vibration in the larynx.  This made things as clear as mud to
> me.  There
> > > were slightly audible differences between individual unaspirated
> > > and fortis
> > > pairs which they produced for us, but I could never generalise the
> > > difference and recognise what made them different.
> >
> > And I still can't figure out what is meant by "glottalized" for the
> > consonants pp, tt, ss, cc, kk. I just cheat and pronounce them ejectives
> > like in Amharic, Georgian and Navajo, but that's probably not
> the correct
> > way. Every description of Korean phonology just mentions
> "glottal tension",
> > which automatically ends up being ejective for me.
>
> Far as I can tell, the above refers to pp, tt, (ss), cc, kk when saying
> "fortis," which I've also seen called "glottalized," which I've also seen
> called "tensified" (I do wish there were one terminology so it'd be less
> confusing).
>
> You'd think the !@#$ descriptions of Korean phonology could list other
> languages (I would hope that there's one or two...) that also has the
> same sounds so you can figure out what the heck they mean.  :-/  If you
> can find me a link to sound clips of ejectives (I tried a couple web
> searches with no luck), I can listen to them and tell you if they sound
> the same as the glottalized/fortis/tensified/??? stops in Korean....
>
> _The Korean Alphabet_ confused me further with terms like "wholly muddy"
> and "neither clear nor muddy" and "raised apicals" until (I'm slow) I
> rediscovered the table of traditional *Chinese* sound classifications
> around Sejong's time.  Not to mention I'm skimming the thing right now
> for any insights, which involves recognizing and skipping a lot of
> interesting but not-currently-relevant stuff on cosmology and Phags-pa
> and who knows what.  :-p
>
> Hmm, possibly useful passage ("The Phonological Analysis Reflected in the
> Korean Writing System" by Young-Key Kim-Renaud in _The Korean Alphabet_,
> p.165):
> (NOTE: Since I can't get the haceks? I've used "eo" for o-hacek and "eu"
> for u-hacek, as is standard)
>
> "It seems that Sejong considered the degree of aspiration a determining
> factor in the famous three-way stop distinction in Korean.  According to
> Chin-W. Kim (1970), who defines aspiration as a function of the glottal
> opening at the time of release of the oral closure of a stop, the glottal
> opening is teh largest in the case of the heavily aspirated series and
> smallest in the tense group.  Thus, in Cheong'eum the slightly aspirated
> sounds were interpreted as ch'eong (clear/airy) and heavily aspirated
> ones even more ch'eong.  Tense sounds were thought to have a close
> contact at the glottis and possibly also at the point of articulation,
> giving the impression of being t'ak (muddy/dense).  It is interesting to
> note that in Korean the strongest consonants were created either by
> opening the glottis wide or by narrowing it tightly.  Rough ch'ach'eong
> sounds were created with an extra stroke, while tense consonants were
> formed by squeezing the same symbol twice into the consonantal space."
>
> Things to keep in mind: this is based on the Korean of Sejong's time
> (though the tensed stops seem not to have changed in nature, except that
> modern Korean doesn't have "hh") and "strongest" refers to the way Sejong
> designed the alphabet hierarchically according to his
> phonological analysis.
>
> > For the same reason I think of the plain consonats as being "voiced".
>
> They changed the transliteration so p, t, c, k are written as b, d, ch
> (no change in that one), g before vowels <shrug>.  You can voice the
> stops in that context and still be understood.  But then, most Koreans
> are very used to deciphering mangled "American Korean" after years of
> Itaewon shoppers and 8th Army people.  =^)
>
> YHL
http://www.geocities.com/dawier


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