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

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 11:49:13PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> H. S. Teoh scripsit:
>
> > Excuse my ignorance... what *is* the difference between an ejective stop
> > and an aspirated stop? :-)
>
> Aspirated stops are the kind Chinese and English has (voiceless);
> there's an exhalation after the stop, more or less like a following [h].
> (Wu Chinese and various Indic langs have voiced aspirated stops, which
> are a little different.)
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.

No criticism of Mr. Wier though. He only transcribed it, so isn't
necessarily responsible for bad data in it, and it's a really interesting
page anyway (even if its dark text spills over onto its dark background).

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo
Conlang code:
CU !lh:m cN:R:S:G a+ y n2d:1d !R* A-- E L* N1 Id:m k- ia- p+ m- o+ P-- d* b+++ lainesco