Re: Voiced Velar Fricative

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Carlos Thompson wrote:
>> But yes.  Spanish /g/ could be realized as [G] (SAMPA, in Kirch is
>> [Q], gamma in IPA), and is perfectly posible besides an /i/, like
>> Colombian goalkeeper "Ren Higuita" /igita/ that is pronounced as
>> [iGita].
>
>Some consider /B D G/ to be more accurate phonemic transcriptions, as
>the stop allophones occur only after nasals, if I recall the conditions
>correctly.
I read about this in an article by Eric Bakovic in the Optimality Theory
(OT) website. Actually, according to the article, the stop allophones of
/B D G/ occured not only after nasals, but also in the beginning of a
prosodic unit called a "breath group" and after /l/ in the case of /D/.
Below is a portion of a table in that article. All the examples given
constitute a breath group:

(1)  [labial]                  [coronal]                [dorsal]
#__  [beso] ‘kiss’             [dato] ‘date’            [gato] ‘cat’
N__  [um beso] ‘a kiss’        [un dato] ‘a date’       [uN gato] ‘a cat’
L__  [el Beso] ‘the kiss’      [el dato] ‘the date’     [el Gato] ‘the cat’
C__  [dar Besos] ‘give kisses’ [dar Datos] ‘give dates’ [dar Gatos] ‘give cats’
V__  [ese Beso] ‘that kiss’    [ese Dato] ‘that date’   [ese Gato] ‘that cat’

(where: [B D G] are voiced fricatives, and [N] is the velar nasal)

>
>Interesting speculation for a future Spanish conlang - stop allophones
>are lost (via mb, nd, ng -> m, n, /N/, or perhaps mm, nn, /N:/), so that
>stops have no voicing distinction, while fricatives do, thus:
-----<snip>-----

After reading the article, I also pondered over a future Spanish conlang.
What I did was drop all syllable-final nasals and laterals so that the stop
allophones are lost. Furthermore, nasal vowels become phonemic where there
once was a syllable-final nasal. The end result is that stops don't have
a voicing contrast, but on the other hand there is a nasal/oral distinction
among vowels. Since there is already a tendency for some dialects to replace
syllable-final <s> with an <h>, I thought of replacing it altogether by some
kind of cue in the phonation in the vowel (perhaps breathy voice), or maybe
even tone. I'm not sure what to do with syllable-final <r>, but if it is
dropped as well, then the result is a future Spanish with only open syllables,
phonemic nasal vowels, and phonemic phonation or tone -- utterly Un-Spanish.

After reading that article in the OT website, I also pondered over whether
a breath group of words could be reinterpreted in a future Spanish as one
word, thus making future Spanish a lot more agglutinating or perhaps even
polysynthetic. Hmmm... that would make it even more Un-Spanish.

-kristian- 8)