Re: USAGE: Of voicing, aspiration, and meticulous analysis ...
| From: | Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 14:10 |
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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.
> This got me thinking about aspiration in my own pronunciaton. The /p t k/ of
> Swedish are in many positions aspirated, and accompanied by a blast of air that
> is quite noticeable if you hold your hand a in front of your mouth.
>
> The odd thing I noticed is that the same air blast is always present with the
> combination [tS], despite [S] by its own not having it, and even in positions
> where /t/ would not have it.
In (my) English, /tS/ also has accompanying aspiration, though only in
the same contexts as /t/ has it. After /s/ when the orthography is not
much guide to the pronunciation, I perceive this unaspirated [tS] as
/dZ/ ... that's mostly in "next year" and "last year" (which I
consider one word); only to a lesser extent in "student" or "string".
(Actually, the set /p t tS k/ are marked by their aspiration at the
start of stressed syllables, and I have to work to even voice /b d dZ
g/ in this context. I'm pretty sure elsewhere the distinction is of
voice, though. Which is really confusing, because the sound that
sounds perfectly like /d/ word initially sounds perfectly like /t/
after a stressed syllable. Anyway, this means that I don't have voiced
stops in onsets, but do have them in codas, which I think contradicts
a universal generalisation. )
...
> *** It means "large", but only in the sense of a clothing size. There's also
> _small_ [smo:l].
Why do you need English borrowings for this? :P
--
Tristan.
(PS Benct: the answer must be "no".)
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