Re: Fricative Nasal Aspiration (was: Re: IPA griefs)

Irina Rempt wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Steg Belsky wrote:
>
>> I tried to aspirate a few fricatives, such as /s/, /f/, and /x/, and the
>> puff of air comes out my *nose* instead of my mouth.  Is this normal for
>> aspirated fricatives?
AFAIK, it is not. I don't think it is difficult to maintain a raised
velum -- that is, to maintain the oral feature. In fact, it is quite
difficult to maintain friction if air was allowed to escape through
the nasal passage. The nasal property requires that the segment be
produced with a lowered velum, and nasal airflow undermines the needed
build-up of pressure behind the oral constriction to produce friction.
As a consequence, perceptible achievement of either nasality or frication
generally suffers in the production of nasalized fricatives. So I believe
that there is even a natural constraint against nasalizing fricatives
so that the acoustic cues for friction does not suffer under
nasalization.This being so, it would necessarily be more natural to
maintain a raised velum throughout such a sequence -- unless you have
purposely tried to nasalize the sequence. If you have, then the acoustic
cues for nasalization could have been so weak during the production of
your fricative that it was perceived as oral, while the acoustic cue for
nasalization did not suffer as much during the aspiration.

This reminds me of how nasal harmony affects voiceless sounds (aspirated
stops and voiceless fricatives) in my conlang, Boreanesian. During a
nasalized sequence, these voiceless sounds appear to be transparent to
nasal harmony. That is, although thay do not block nasal harmony, they
do not nasalize either. But what I think is happening is that the acoustic
cues for nasalization in these segments are so weak that they are all
typically percieved as oral. I wish I had the proper equipment to
investigate this.

>I can't make a real difference between an aspirated fricative and an
>unaspirated one; aren't fricatives aspirated already?
Not really. It depends how you want to define aspirated, I guess. If
you define it only with the presence of the feature /spread glottis/,
then I suppose fricatives could be considered aspirated. In Danish, for
instance, both aspirated stops and fricatives share this same feature
of /spread glottis/. But the fricatives don't have that characteristic
puff of air and delayed voice onset that aspirated stops have in Danish.
The same can be said for English, I guess. The reasons are physiological
and I won't bother to bore the list with that. Strictly speaking,
aspiration should also include the feature of a delayed voice onset. So
in an aspirated fricative, the vocal chords don't begin to vibrate until
some time after the friction has ceased, while in an unaspirated
fricative, the vocal chords begin to vibrate immediately after the
friction has ceased. These are in fact reported to be constrastive in
some natlangs. Burmese, for instance, is said to have an aspirated and
non-aspirated /s/ -- a contrast that parallels all the other obstruents
in Burmese. Evidence from languages like Burmese obviously forces one to
conclude that fricatives aren't necessarily aspirated already.

-kristian- 8)