Re: Phonetics vs. Phonemics (was: apparently bizarre 'A's)

That's right; I remember Ray mentioning Tamil and Shoshoni having
similar processes, right down to the gemination and post-nasal
voicing. Shoshoni also has a more opaque process whereby /h/ and a
voiceless stop merge to a voiceless fricative.

Dirk

On 2/24/06, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Dirk Elzinga skrev:
> > On 2/24/06, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >>I also seem to recall hearing of a language where /k/ had a [G] allophone
> >>between vowels, which, while easy to imaging diachronically, is a pretty stark
> >>difference synchronically.
> >
> >
> > Perhaps you recall reading one of my earlier posts on Shoshoni; it has
> > just this kind of  allophony.
>
> One rather well-known language which has this allophony
> is Tamil. /k/ is [k] word initially and in gemination,
> [g] after /n/ (which becomes [N] in this position) and
> [G] when ungeminated between vowels.  Obviously it is
> nonsense to speak of a main allophone -- what we have is
> a velar obstruent phoneme with different realizations in
> different positions.  Other obstruents in Tamil have
> similar allophony.
>
> --
> /BP 8^)>
> --
> Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
>
>     "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
>     it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
>     means "no"!
>
>                             (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)
>

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