Re: Half-Voiced Stops (was: Rotokas)

Quoting Emily Zilch <emily0@...>:

> { 20040617,1426 | Mark "-- Mark" P. Line } "Is the second phoneme in
> English "skip" a /k/ or a /g/? And does this question have a general
> answer for all native speakers?"
>
> This leads to the observation that some descriptions of Beijing
> Standard Mandarin have "half-voicing" marked for the unaspirated series
> - this is indicated with [ b ] etc. with circles beneath. I speak
> Mandarin and I'm not sure whether this is a valid analysis - it's as
> ambiguous to me as the "skip" example Mark mentions.
>
> Does anyone know if other R/L languages have these?
Well, Swedish have the very same issue with 'sp', 'st', 'sk'.

My personal belief is that the phonematication varies from speaker to speaker.
This is based on the observation that some kids learning to write tend to
misspell them as 'sb', 'sd', 'sg', but others do not.

                                                        Andreas

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