Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:40:32 +0000, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

>*shrugs* I was always unsure about fortis vs lenis. I've been told I
>think that Dutch distinguishes fortis vs lenis rather than voiced vs
>voiceless.... I could be wrong though. I've even heard some people argue
>that voicing isn't the primary distinction in English (I can't remember
>what they were arguing was the primary distinction...), but I wasn't
>convinced that they weren't just being difficult. Do the other germanic
>languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
Most of them do, I think. Swiss German dialects, e.g., don't (though there
are clusters of fortis + /h/).

>Another thing
>I've often wondered: english has unvoiced aspirated stops. Often you
>hear about languages that have an unvoiced vs voiced vs aspirate three
>way distinction in stops.
Ancient Greek, e.g.

>Can you find voiced aspirated stops? And if
>you can, is there any language with a four way distinction unvoiced
>unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced
>aspirated?
Sanskrit, e.g., and I suppose that this distinction is also found in modern
Indian languages. Phonetically, the "voiced aspirated" stops are "breathy
voiced". I remember I've read as an explanation that there's not a real
aspiration, but that the following vowel starts voiceless. However, I don't
understand how this is really different from an aspiration.

>Although a voiced aspirated stop would probably easily
>migrate to a voiced fricative..... "softening" of voiced stops as in
>Spanish seems pretty common in languages anyway, and aspiration tends to
>make consonants even "softer" to my ears.
I think this depends on the language: While there are languages where these
substitutions are made several times in a few thousend years, others retain
it unchanged.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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