Re: Unaspirated vs. Voiceless

Raymond Brown wrote:

>At 6:57 pm +0100 9/3/99, Kristian Jensen wrote:
>>To my understanding, the so called aspirated trill in Welsh for
>>instance is in fact simply a voiceless trill. From what I have
>>heard of Welsh, there is a spread glottis, but the delay in
>>voicing is not long enough in my opinion to be called a truly
>>aspirated trill. Perhaps that's just me, and I'm NOT an expert on
>>Welsh. I would say, however, that they indeed must exist
>>somewhere.
>
>I sounds pretty aspirated to me.  All the Welsh I've heard make the
>aspiration very strong; indeed, where there's been "noise" I've
>sometimes heard only /h/.  The north Walians are pretty good with
>their trills and that generally remains; but as Sally has observed
>in the south in /rh/ the trill is often no more than a flap and the
>_aspiration_ almost "drowns it out".
Hmmm... Then maybe I heard a variant where I thought I heard an /h/
when in fact I was hearing an aspirated trill. That is, a variant
where the aspiration has "drowned out" the trill entirely. Like I
said, I'm no Welsh expert. The only Welsh I have heard was on a TV
movie some time ago.

-kristian- 8-)