Re: A few phonetics-related q's

On Sep 13, 2004, at 5:30 PM, Roger Mills wrote:

> Trebor wrote:
>
>> In a word like /anta/, would it be more likely that it's pronounced
>> [anda]
>> or [an_0ta]?
>
> It might depend on other tendencies in the language.  Does
> assimilation in
> general tend to be progressive-- i.e are there clusters of the sort
> /-bk-/ >
> [-bg-]-- or regressive, i.e. the cluster /-bk-/ > [-pk-].
>
> Nasal clusters however tend not to behave like stop clusters; the
> voicing
> predominates, so I'd say [anda] is a more likely outcome.
>
> But there are cases where nasals are lost or changed before voiceless
> sounds, so even your [an_0ta] is not impossible. It would more likely
> lead
> over time to something like [ahta] or [a?ta] or [at:a].
I think that [an_0ta] is highly unlikely. Cross-linguistically,
clusters of nasal+voiceless stop seem to be dispreferred. Phonetically
this can be understood as resistance to a vocal fold opening gesture so
close on the heels of the modal voicing found in nasals. There are
several strategies for resolving these clusters:

1.  voice the stop
2.  make a geminate by denasalizing the nasal (or if the cluster does
not share place of articulation, making a two-stop cluster: i.e., /mt/
-> /pt/
3.  make a geminate by nasalizing the stop
4.  delete the nasal
5.  strengthen the stop by aspirating it; this doesn't resolve the NC
cluster, but it makes it emphatically an NC cluster

A couple of things don't seem to happen:

1.  delete the stop
2.  devoice the nasal

Of course, these are all *tendencies*, rather than necessary (or
prohibited) courses of action. My own project, Miapimoquitch, voices
the stop in all NC clusters; I grabbed the rule from Shoshoni, which
has the same process.

>> If a language has a rule (a) /s/ is [S] before /i/ and (b) /s/ is [z]
>> intervocalically, would it be more likely that a word like /asi/ be
>> pronounced [azi] or [aZi] or even [aSi]?
>
> Let's see if I can get this right.... It depends on the ordering of the
> rules (that is, of the events).
>
> Order A:  Rule l. s > S before i
> Rule 2. s > z between vowels
> OK: Vsi will > VSi, while Vsa, Vsu, etc. will > Vza, Vzu etc. (The
> first
> rule removes -si from the possible environments of rule 2).  [S] and
> [s]
> will presumably be in complementary distribution and so non-phonemic.
>
> Order B.  Rule 1. s > z between vowels
> In this case a rule "s > S before i" is impossible, since all instances
> of -VsV have been changed to -VzV; if you still want the fricative
> pronunciation to occur, then Rule2 will have to be "z > Z before i"
> (This
> all looks neater if you use distinctive feature notation)
When you get down to distinctive features, you might find that the
relevant palatalization rule is:

[+continuant, +coronal, +anterior] -> [-anterior] / __ [+vocalic,
+high, -back]

which may follow the voicing rule without disqualifying Palatalization,
since both [z] and [s] share the features [+continuant, +coronal,
+anterior]. To restrict the palatalization rule to [-voice] segments
seems unlikely (but of course not impossible). For that matter, the
voicing rule may apply to all fricatives and not just [s]. So I think
that [VZi] is a plausible outcome for underlying /Vsi/.

>> French nasal vowels can differ from their oral counterparts, cf. [i] ~
>> [e~].
>> Is there an articulatory/acoustic precedence for this? What are some
>> oral-nasal correspondances for /i/, /e/, /A/, etc.?
>>
> I think that's a purely French phenomenon-- nasalized vowels all are
> lowered
> i > E~, y > (the rounded version of E~), o > O~, some merge (e/a both
> > a~),
> etc.  My French is limited and I can't think of an instance of
> nasalized
> /u/, are there any???
>
> In Portuguese, the nasalized vowels are simply that: i :: i~, u :: u~
> etc.
>
> The motivation in French might have been that since nasalized vowels
> derive
> from closed syllables ...VN# or ...VNC..., the lowering could be due to
> generalized allophonic lowering of vowels in closed syllables.
No, I think that there is good acoustic phonetic motivation for
lowering nasalized vowels; see my earlier post.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie