Re: USAGE: Voicing and aspiration (was: "Transferral" verb form ...)

John Cowan writes:
 > Tim May scripsit:
 >
 > > Is the kind of link between voicing and aspiration seen in English
 > > common?  That is, in languages where only one of these is regarded as
 > > phonemic, is it common for the other to correlate with it to that
 > > degree?
 >
 > Certainly not uncommon.  The other Germanic languages do it, and so does
 > Celtic.  Mandarin comes at it from the other direction: aspiration is
 > controlling and voice/voiceless is heard as nonasp/asp, as in Pinyin
 > writing where "b" = [p] and "p" = [p_h].
 >
So a Mandarin speaker would (be likely to) recognize a voiced stop as
nonaspirated and vice-versa _even if the speaker were, say, Spanish,
and not making any aspirational distinction_?  ie, they'd recognize
[p] as /p_h/ and [b] as /p/?  I knew that the distinction was one of
aspiration, and that the Pinyin lined up with English, but I hadn't
considered how this worked with other languages.

 > But then in the Romance languages aspiration is unknown, and in Indic
 > languages aspiration and voicing vary separately ("voiced aspirated"
 > is really aspiration followed by a murmured vowel).
 >

Reply