Re: "Transferral" verb form in LC-01

En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

 In Spanish (and this is speaking from
> experience, not phonetics), the voiced stops just seem to be longer,
> when
> they're actually stops and not fricatives.  I don't know if that's true,
> or
> if that's just a strange impression I'm getting.
The impression is due to the fact that being voiced like the surrounding
vowels, voiced stops fit better in the spoken stream and their limits are more
difficult to spot, unlike the voiceless stops which are such a disturbance in
the spoken stream that they are easily segregated. That's why people tend to
think that voiced stops are longer than voiceless ones. It's not that they are
necessary longer, but perceptually their limits are harder to notice (note that
it's the main reason why voiced stops are called "soft" in one of my books).

  Anyway, the point was
> that
> distinguishing between something like [t] and [d] without any
> secondary
> articulatory features is not that easy.  It can be done, but more often
> than
> not, languages will compensate via other means.
>
I'm not sure French does. Vowels are not longer before voiced stops (foreigners
tend to hear that, but it's an artefact due again to the difficulty to spot the
exact limit between a vowel and a voiced stop), nor after, and there are no
other articulatory features I can think of that accompany voicing. I actually
wonder why such a strong distinguishing feature like voicing would need another
feature to recognise it. If you say that you can say the same of aspiration
(which I hadn't noticed in English initial voiceless stops until someone
pointed that out on the list a few years ago...). To me voicing is a strong
distinguishing feature that doesn't need anything else to be recognisable, but
aspiration is nearly inaudible. I guess this is again more a problem of first
language and common distinctions made rather than absolute quality.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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