Re: the lonely affricate

At 8:21 pm +0100 24/6/99, Fabian wrote:
........
>
>Russian has a 'ch' but no 'j', at least in the script. They *might* use
>a written consonant cluster to round this out, I'm not too sure.
They do - it's {d} + {Z}.

Russian also has the affricate /ts/ with its own letter; but no letter for
/dz/.  Again, when necessary they write it with two letters {d} and {z}.

>But
>that does suggest that when the script was invented, such a sound did
>not exist. So Old Russian (1400 ad?) didnt have the sound.
Not an expert on Old Slavonic, but I suspect the sounds may have existed
but that just as in modern Russian, they are markedly rarer than the
voiceless forms and did not function as single affricates in the same way
that the voiceless affricates.

In English very few people would argue that /tS/ and /dZ/ are not
affricates but a combination of two other independent phonemes.  That's not
how the sounds function in English.  On the other hand, no one will set up
/ts/ and /dz/ as affricates even though we have words like 'flotsam' and
'weds'.

German has two regular affricates /ts/, written {z}, and /pf/.  But it
doesn't have the voiced equivalents.  Spanish has /tS/ but no /dZ/.

Examples of languages with voiceless affricates but no voiced ones are not
difficult to find.  But examples of the reverse are markedly rarer.
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At 4:19 pm -0400 24/6/99, Josh Roth wrote:
......
>
>Arabic has /dZ/ but no /tS/. I don't think it has any other affricates..
's right - it doesn't.

Egyptian Arabic does not even have that affricate - they Egyptians preserve
the sound /g/ which AFAIK all other versions of modern Arabic has given way
to /dZ/.

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At 4:48 pm -0400 24/6/99, Bryan Maloney wrote:
>Not quite an affricate (if I remember my categories aright), but some
>forms of Old English did not distinguish between [s] and [z], or so I've
>read.
Yes - it's "not quite an affricate" in the sense that it is a fricative   :)
Affricates begin with a stop or occlusion and are released with friction.

All forms of Old English did not distinguish between [s] and [z], the
sounds being conditioned allophones of /s/, just as in modern Spanish,for
example.  Again one can find many examples of languages with just a single
phoneme /s/ but no corresponding voiced phoneme /z/; but occurrences of
only /z/ are rarer.

Old English, BTW, also did not distinguish between [f] and [v], [T] and
[D], [x] and [h].

Ray.