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

From:Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 14:10
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".)

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>