> 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).
>