Re: Further Questions on Phonology

 --- Andy Canivet wrote:

> I was wondering if it was reasonable to have a language that makes the
> distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants - but does not include
> any voiced fricatives (eg. d, t, b, p, g, k, but only f, s, sh, etc with no
> v, z, or zh).
Why not?
I would argue that it exists already, namely in Amsterdam.
Speakers of this city dialect have a strong tendency to change pronounce |z|
like [s]. Likewise, in those cases when a sound ought to be pronounced like
[Z], which is the case only in foreign loanwords, in Amsterdam people would
rather produce an [S]-like sound (or rather [sj], but that's a different
story...
In Dutch, we make a distinction between three labiodental fricatives: |f|, |v|,
and |w|; the |v| is usually somewhere between voiced and unvoiced. In
Amsterdam, the |v| is consequently pronounced [f].

> There may be a historical work-around - by having some archaic root language
> that did not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced, and then the modern
> form that makes the distinction but only in a few cases...  Does this make
> sense? or would the language get all the voiced correlates of it's unvoiced
> consonants once it opened the door to voicing any of them?  Is there another
> way to have voiced & unvoiced plosives and glottals but only unvoiced
> fricatives?
Why so complicated? Voiced fricatives take a larger effort to pronounce than
unvoiced. I don't want to repeat the discussion about "laziness" in
pronunciation, but having lived fourteen years in Amsterdam and out of personal
experience I must say, that it feels rather comfortable. :)

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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