Re: help! phonology...& addendum

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  Carlos Eugenio Thompson Pinzón
  Bogotá, Colombia
  ICQ: 19156333
  URL: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/9028/

----- Original Message -----
From: "jesse stephen bangs" <jaspax@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: help! phonology...& addendum


> > On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 02:21:24PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > > On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > And I just noticed that /c/ and /C/ also have voiced versions
which
> > > aren't represented, and the asymmetry of that worries me too.
> > [snip]
> >
> > A language doesn't need to have voiced consonants IIRC... the only
> > compulsory rule I know of is that if there is an
affricate/fricative sound
> > of a particular class (eg. dentals, velars, etc.), then there must
be a
> > corresponding simple stop. So if you have /x/, either /g/ or /k/
would
> > need to be present. But this does not go the other way -- just
because you
> > have /k/ doesn't mean you must have /x/. And I *suspect* that the
presence
> > of /k/ does not require the presence of /g/, but I may be wrong...
>
> I've heard this rule, too, but I just thought of an obvious
exception in
> English.  English has six dental/alveolar fricatives /T D s z S Z/
but
> only four sounds that could reasonably be called stops /t d tZ dZ/.
No
> matter how you slice it *some* set of fricative is gonna be
orphaned,
> unless you make the silly assertion that /T D/ are the "same class"
as /s
> z/.
Well.
  In English, Spanish and Swedish you have labiodental /f/ but no
labiodental stop.
  In Peninsular Spanish you have both /T/ and /s/ but only one coronal
stop pair /t d/.  Anyhow /T/ is interdental and /s/ is laminal.
  In Bogotá Spanish, and I'm almost sure most Spanish dialects outside
Rio de La Plata, you have a palatal fricative /j\/ but no palatal
stop.  Well, I have an africate that wanders between postalveolar /tS/
and palatal /cC/.
  And in Central American and Colombian dialects <j> is [h], a glotal
fricative, but there is no glotal stop.  And I'm sure that when I say
"a" there is not [?a] but [a].

It seems that in Spanish (some dialects): stops are bilabial (vd &
vl), dental (vd & vl) and velar (vd & vl), while fricatives (except
the oclusive/fricative alternation in voiced stops) are labiodental
(vl), alveolar (vl), palatal (vd) and glotal (vl), and the only
africate is postalveolar (vl).

> Another "universal" bites the dust . . . (but it's still not a bad
rule of
> thumb)
-- Carlos Th