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

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....
For the distinctions between /s/ and /z/ [z_0], and /f/ and /v/ [v_0],
this is often true, but this may be subject to individual and/or
regional variation. I don't know if this also occurs for other voiced
consonants.

> 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.
I learnt the following things from the great book "Accepted American
Pronunciation: A Practical Guide for Speakers of Dutch":

The primary distinction between word-initial stops like "pet" and "bet"
is aspiration. Dutch people, when speaking English, often risk their
(unaspirated) /p/, /t/ and /k/ to be mistaken for /b/, /d/ and /g/.

An important (the primary?) distinction between word-final stops like
"bet" and "bed" is the vowel length. For "free" vowels the difference is
even greater (as in "feet" and "feed").

> Do the other germanic
> languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
Dutch doesn't. Just unaspirated stops.

Éylo
René

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