Re: nasalless and stopless language

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> >
> >> I don't mean to say the all plosives are voiceless, but they are during
> >> the time when the air-flow is cut off, since the vocal cords can't
> vibrate
> >> if there is no air movement.
>
>
> Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> >Not true. If a stop is held long enough then sure, they will of
> >necessity become voiceless for the very reason you state. This is a
> >reason why voiced geminate stops are not as common as voiceless
> >geminate stops.
> The Austronesian langs. of South Sulawesi (ex-Celebes) abound in geminate
> stops, both voiced and voiceless.  The latter, of course, are relatively
> easy to produce.  For the voiced gem. stops, most of the languages resort to
> a cluster glottal stop + stop; one informant even had an brief intrusive
> echo of the preceding vowel between the /?/ and the stop.
So they really aren't voiced geminates after all! (whatever they may
be underlyingly).

> The Buginese,
> however, consider the /?C/ pronunciation to be inelegant.  As nearly as I
> could determine, and produce to their satisfaction, you hold the stop
> closure (without glottal closure) just to the point of  voicelessness, then
> release it; at the time of release there's probably a very brief period of
> voicelessness before voicing restarts (these are always intervocalic).
> Graphically and stretched out, sort of /-b....(p)b-/.   Does that make
> sense?
It does make sense, and is precisely what one might expect to have
happen to a voiced geminate stop. This also reminds me of something
interesting I heard about Buginese voiced geminate stops and [?C]
clusters. The story I heard was that morpheme-internally you have true
geminates, while at morpheme boundaries you get a [?C] cluster. Gotta
love the cycle.

> Interestingly, in Buginese, historic *_nasal+vl.stop_ > geminate vl. stop,
> while *_nasal +vd.stop_ > nasal+vl. stop.   With a distressing number of
> exceptions, presumably inter-language or Malay/Jav. loans.
Is this only morpheme-internally or also at morpheme boundaries?

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu