Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:25:01 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >Quoting j_mach_wust <j_mach_wust@...>:
> >
> >> FWIK, the Swiss/Alemannic opposition of fortis and lenis is the same
> >> as in Finnish, even though the Alemannic opposition is represented as
> >> [d_0] vs. [t(:)], whereas the Finnish isn't called a fortis-lenis
> >> opposition and is represented as [t] vs. [t:].
> >
> >Hm. I hear Finnish 't' as /t/, not /d/, which I'd expect if it were a
> >dental or alveolar voiceless non-aspirated lenis stop. I guess it might be
> >not lenis enough.
>
> What is a lenis? I don't know it for sure; I just know that the Swiss
> German short voiceless stops are caled lenes, and these are identical with
> Finnish /t, p, k/.
_Lenis_ is Latin for "soft" - I guess "lenes" might be the pl?

Anyway, fortis~lenis signifies a distinction in articulatory force; during the
production of a fortis sound, the muscles involved are more tense than during
the production of a lenis one. This, of course, isn't really a binary
distinction, but a continuum of possibilities, in which certain languages pick
to points to contrast (others don't - I'm told Vietnamese stops are roughly
halfway 'tween English fortis and lenis ones).

In the Germanic languages, voiced stops are generally pronounced with less
articulatory force than voiceless ones, and thus we say their lenis, and the
voiceless ones fortis. Many varieties of English, Swedish and German have
devoiced, wholly or partly, in some or all positions the voiced stops, but
thanks to the difference in "forticity" (not sure if that's a word) been able
to maintain the phonemic contrast even when aspiration isn't at hand to
disambiguate (Icelandic, OTOH, has, IIUC, turned it into a straightforward
aspirated~unaspirated contrast).

> I've been told by Swiss people that the typical Finnish accent is
> to 'weaken' all German /p, t, k/ as if they were /b, d, g/. The only way I
> could explain this (and which makes perfectly sense to me) is that Finnish
> speakers when speaking German (Swiss standard German) pronounce the German
> <p, t, k> in the same way they are used to pronounce them in Finnish: like
> Finnish /p, t, k/, the short voiceless stops of Finnish.
I do not know much of Finnish phonetics. What I found surprising was the claim
that the Finnish short stops /p t k/ were lenis, because that ought to mean
they're voiceless unaspirated lenis, which is how I'd describe the frequent
unvoiced allophones of Swedish /b d g/ in my own speech, yet my brain is wont
to identify them with Swedish /p t k/, which are voiceless aspirated fortis.

The most immediate explanation would seem to be that while these Finnish sounds
are lenis by the standards of Finnish (and apparently by those of Swiss
German), they're not by those of Swedish; the languages simply draw the line at
different points in the continuum.

(The next one would be that I'm wrong about the Finnish sounds being
unaspirated, altho that would raise the question what the Swiss have done to
Germanic's cherised aspirates - Germanics perceiving unvoiced aspirated stops
as the "voiced" series would be faintly exotic!)


                                                        Andreas