Re: "Voiced aspirates" (was Re: YACQ: Plausibility of a sound change)

Eric Christopherson wrote:
>Wu too? I was originally under the impression that the only languages which
>had them were a few Indic languages and Igbo. I got this from a page
>maintained by former Conlang member Tom Wier,
>http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~twier/mimungsociety/mimungglottalic.html :
>
>> Only six
>> of the world's languages have the so-called "voiced aspirates"
>> [bh dh gh] at all. Five are in India (all modern reflexes of Sanskrit);
>> the sixth is Igbo in Africa.
>
>But upon browsing Ladegefod's _Preliminaries to Phonology_ (or something
>like that anyway), I came across more examples of them, which Ladegefod
>calls "murmured stops." And now John says Wu... hmm. Perhaps the
traditional
>PIE reconstruction really isn't so weird after all.>
Come to think of it, Madurese of Indonesia has voiced aspirates, at least in
the romanized spelling (probably transliterated from a Javanese/Sanskritized
script); but I've never heard the lang. and suspect they may just be
"breathy" or very lax(and in any case not historical), as are the plain
voiced stops (for many speakers)  of neighboring Javanese.  Interesting
sidebar:  Javanese students frequently had trouble hearing "normal" voiced
stops (like Engl. or other regional langs.) and tended to call them
"preglottalized".