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

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Saturday, December 11, 2004, 19:26
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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Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>