Re: USAGE: Of voicing, aspiration, and meticulous analysis ...

On 01/06/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> >On 31/05/06, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> > > I was reading a phonology text* discussing differences in voice onset
> >time
> > > ("VOT") in occlusives. In order from early to late VOT they divide 'em
> >into
> > > five broad classes; voiced, halfvoiced, voiceless, aspirated, and
> >strongly
> > > aspirated**. Apparently, no know language uses more than three classes
> > > contrastively, so thos looking for ANADEW-breaking have a chance here.
> >
> >Do any distinguish voiced and halfvoiced or aspirated and strongly
> >aspirated, or are these only phonetic/crosslinguistic distinctions?
> >The wikipedia page <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time>
> >seems to agree with my suspicions.
>
> >Tristan.
>
> Some varieties of Finnish might fit the bill... Our /p t k/ are claimed to
> have a small negative VOT, altho so short that it's practically inaudible to
> the naked ear. Loanwords with fully voiced /b d g/ are anmyway not all that
> rare. (Nativ <d> is [d] only in a few 'lects, plus /t/ being [t_d] provides
> even then an additional distinction.)
No, I doubt it does. If the prevoicing or aspiration is less than
20ms, it very much counts as unvoiced. When presented with two stimuli
(over basically any sense), a human basically can't tell which one
came first if they were separated by less than 20 ms.

--
Tristan.