Re: Voicing Continuum (was: Linguistic Terminology)

Kristian Jensen wrote:
> You mentioned, Nik, if I understood you correctly, that you do not
> know of any language that contain only one phonation. But in many
> Polynesian languages, the stops are only voiceless.
But their vowels are voiced - 2 phonations.  Non-contrastive, perhaps,
but 2 phonations nevertheless.

> Similarly, in
> some Australian languages, the stops are only voiced.
Are there any voiceless sounds, perhaps fricatives?

> A language
> that you might find interesting is described in the book as having
> contrasting pairs of stops that are *not* between 'voice' and
> 'voiceless'. In fact, they are ALL 'voiced': slack voiced stops
> contrasting phonemically with stiff voiced stops. This language is
> Javanese.
Interesting!

> Based on the examples like Javanese given in the book, I still think
> it is misleading to have the terms 'voice' and 'unvoice' alone while
> disregarding the exact laryngeal settings. How would you have
> otherwise described Javanese stops: "constrasting stops between
> voiced and voiced"? Hmmm... I don't think so. Something else is
> missing.
Well, it seems that what that book called "modal voiced" stops can be
simply referred to as "voiced" with no ambiguity when it does not
contrast, in much the same way as /l/ is usually referred to as a
"lateral" rather than the more detailed "lateral approximate" since,
unless there are also lateral fricatives, there's no reason to specify
approximate.  Or another example, there's no need to refer to English
stops as "partially modally voiced" and "voiceless sometimes-aspirated",
since those don't contrast with anything else.  Voiced vs. voiceless is
sufficient.

> I hope that was enlightening 8-)
Very much so.

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