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

Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>:

> 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?
It doesn't say. Contrasting fully voiced with halfvoiced doesn't sound too
outrageous, but I have a hard time imagining a language contrasting different
degrees of aspiration.

A species better equipped than us to discriminate between very small time
intervals could have a potentially infinite number of distinctions of VOT,
however.

> > 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.
[snip]

This is sorta unsurprising, since in English /tS/ is undeniably a unitary
phoneme, and affricates often behave much like stops phonologically. Asserting
/tS/ as a phonological stop in Swedish would, OTOH, be rather outré, and the
behaviour would be exceptional in any case.

> > *** 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
If we only borrowed English words when there was a need for it, modern Swedish
would be rather different. However, here it actually serves a purpose - a
_large_ t-shirt isn't nessarily _stor_ "large", nor a _small_ one necessarily
"liten". My t-shirts range from M to XXL with little appreciable difference in
actual size.

                                             Andreas

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