Re: Language Sketch: Gogido

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 01:20, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:
>
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
>> wrote:
>> > It implies that my default pronunciation in most cases is voiced,
>> > although there's free variation between the voiced and unvoiced
>> > allophones.
>>
>> In the case of Okaikiar, I'm not consistent.  It has [t] and [d]  in
>> allophonic variation, likewise  [s] and [z], but there's no [g], only
>> [k].  I suspect this is massively unrealistic.
>
> There are languages, most famously perhaps varieties of Arabic, that have /t d
> k/ but no /g/ or [g]*. Given this, having a voiced allophone of /t/ but not of
> /k/ doesn't seem surprising in a language that doesn't distinguish phonemic
> voice.
>
> * Having /t d g/ but no /k/ is apparently less common - the explanation is
> supposed to be that modal voicing is relatively hard to sustain for back stops
> (pressure builds up faster due to less space between the glottis and the closure
> of the vocal track) so that if there's only back stop it tends to "default" to
> voicelessness.
And at the other end of the buccal tract, apparently if there is only
one bilabial stop, it tends to be a voiced one (Arabic is another
example here, with /b/ but no /p/).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>