On Saturday, December 11, 2004, at 06:40 , Chris Bates 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.
Probably right, I suspect. Fortis & lenis refer to the manner of
articulation of consonants.
FORTIS - consonant sound made with a relatively strong degree of muscular
effort and breath force.
LENIS - consonant sound made with relatively weak degree of muscular
effort and breath force.
I believe these terms are often used in the description of German dialects.
Certainly an Austrian girl who stayed with us for a couple of years when
we live in South Wales, pronounced her plosives rather differently from
English when speaking English, so there were sometimes misunderstandings
as to whether she said 'brick' or 'prick'. But I am no expert on German
dialectology.
> 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...),
Possibly aspiration - I have seen English described this way.
> but I wasn't convinced that they weren't just being difficult.
Nor I. I see no good reason to abandon the tradition 'voiced' ~ 'voiceless'
distinction as far as English is concerned. In any case, voiceless
plosives are not aspirated in all environments - and the treatment of
final voiceless plosives seems to vary considerably in UK regional spech.
> Do the other germanic
> languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
AFAIK most (al?) do.
> 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 :)
> Can you find voiced aspirated stops?
Yes.
> And if
> you can, is there any language with a four way distinction unvoiced
> unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced
> aspirated?
Yes - sanskrit, and modern Urdu/Hindi and AFAIK quite a few related
languages of India.
> Although a voiced aspirated stop would probably easily
> migrate to a voiced fricative.....
Not so in these languages.
> "softening" of voiced stops as in
> Spanish seems pretty common in languages anyway,
It has happened in earlier stages of western Romance & the Brittonic
languages, but it is by no means universal.
> and aspiration tends to make consonants even "softer" to my ears.
It can do as we see in the historic development of the gaelic languages.
But once again it is not universal. In Welsh the voiceless plosives really
are fortis - they are aspirated and pronounced vigorously. After a
stressed vowel they are geminated & preserve their aspiration; cf. English
_happy_ with Welsh _hapus_ [hap'p_hI\s]. The medial sounds are vey
different. In English the medial /p/ is not geminate and has little or no
aspiration.
Ray
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