Re: Lenition

--- In conlang@y..., Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@F...> wrote:

> Well, I don't want to begin the flamewar that happened a few month ago about
> whether voiced sounds are "softer" or "harder" than voiceless sounds, but
> suffice to say that most people seem to find voiced sounds to be softer than
> unvoiced ones (I am of them)
Same here.



> I still really don't understand by what logic English speakers call voiced
> sounds "harder" than unvoiced sounds. I was extremely surprised the first time
> I heard such a claim, and I still cannot imagine what it can mean.
I was quite flabbergasted myself, but I do have a theory by now.  =P

I assume those people somehow confound hardness with loudness.  The
human speech apparatus can produce voiced sounds with much greater
volume than unvoiced ones.

However, "hardness" is a qualitative property, not a quantitative one.
Try whacking someone with a wet towel -- it's certainly going to hurt
them more than lovingly touching them with a nightstick, despite the
fact that the latter is harder.  If you were to wield the nightstick
with the same force as the towel, the situation would be very
different, of course.

Similarly, if you were to produce an /f/ with the same loudness
(volume) as a /v/, you'd have no doubt about which is harder.  You
can try that with any cheap sound editor on your own machine.


-- Christian Thalmann

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