Re: The World Atlas of Language Structures

On Apr 25, 2008, at 10:20 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> On Apr 25, 2008, at 9:52 PM, Paul Bennett wrote:
>
>> The World Atlas of Language Structures is now available for free
>> online, in a nifty Google Maps powered form.
>>
>> http://www.wals.info/
>>
>> I cannot succinctly explain it, except to place it at least on the
>> same level as STARLING, IEIOL, indo-european.nl, and the Rosetta
>> Project on my list of awesome linguistics resources.
>
> Indeed it is cool! But it says that Spanish shows voicing contrast
> in fricatives and not plosives :/
I hadn't actually *read* what it has to say about Spanish, which is:

> Note that Spanish is not treated as having a voicing contrast in
> plosives since the sounds written with the letters b, d, g are not
> pronounced as plosives in most of their occurrences in speech but
> as voiced fricatives or approximants. Spanish therefore belongs to
> the final group of languages in this classification, those with a
> voicing contrast in fricatives but not in plosives.
>
I don't know whether to buy this or not. There are cases where they
occur as voiced stops (unlike in e.g. Greek).

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