Re: Voicing Continuum (was: Linguistic Terminology)

Nik Taylor wrote:

>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.
>
Oh, I get it! I see what you mean. Then check out Australian
languages.

>> Similarly, in
>> some Australian languages, the stops are only voiced.
>
>Are there any voiceless sounds, perhaps fricatives?
>
That's what's so special about Australian languages! They completely
lack fricatives! (Someone here in Conlang-L once said 'its too hot
down there for all that friction'). Its rare among the world's
languages, yet this is nevertheless true for Australian.
Furthermore, the feature of voicing is completely unimportant to
Australian languages. Instead, Australian languages have an
incredible number of contrasting places of articulation (especially
in the coronal area). The book also mentions (page 53) that the
Australian stops "may be produced with no actual opening required
[in the arytenoid cartilages], with vibration ceasing only due to
lack of efforts to sustain it".

When I started creating the phonology for Boreanesian, I
experimented with the idea of a phonology like the Australian. I
thought at first that such a language with these kinds of features
would be crisp sounding - and BOY was I wrong. In the end, it
somehow got too weird for me. Too "wuga buga wuga buga" for me.
Somehow, that's not crisp sounding to my ears.

>> 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.
That's the way I understood modal voiced too.

  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.
Hmmm... you're right. I'm just a sucker for details. 8-) I was
thinking more for instances like for narrow phonetic transcriptions.
Like when talking about John Fisher's dialectal pronounciation of
stops. Are they really voiceless or are they in fact slack voiced?
If the general concensus is that /b/d/g/ is voiced, then John
Fisher's pronounciation of these stops are slack voiced and not just
voiceless. He did say, "in my accent at least, an initial /d/, in
'duck' for example, is barely voiced, if at all." This leads me to
think that there *is* SOME kind of voicing taking place, but not
much.

Regards,
-Kristian- 8-)