Re: Linguistic Terminology

Nik Taylor wrote:
>John Fisher wrote:
>> It's an old question, but a good one: why do we call this an
>> allophone of /t/, and not of /d/?  After all, in my accent at
>> least, an initial /d/, in 'duck' for example, is barely voiced,
>> if at all.  The main salient difference acoustically is in the
>> aspiration.  So why shouldn't we say that that 'still', for
>> example, is /sdIl/ rather than /stIl/?
>
>For me, and, I suspect, most dialects, initial /d/ is always
>voiced, tho partially unvoiced.  Aspiration increases the
>difference, but it is not the sole, or even salient, difference -
>voicing is.  /d/ always contains some voicing, while /t/ never
>does, and since the sound in "still" is completely unvoiced, it
>would have to be /t/, and not /d/.
>
I suspect that this is merely a transcription practice. Anything
aspirated would be transcribed as /p/t/k/ and anything unaspirated
as /b/d/g/. Voicing has little to do with the transcription.
Actually, IMHO, the term 'voiced' and 'unvoiced' is pretty
misleading because it gives the impression that its a binary feature
when in fact there is a pretty broad spectrum from creaky voiced to
modal voice to unvoice (there are several other kinds of voicing in
between these three). I suspect that in John's dialect, initial /d/
is in fact something called 'slack voice' (something between modal
voice and voiceless).

This pronounciation of stops reminds me of Danish. In fact, Danish
words like 'skift' is transcribed phonetically as [sgifd] where the
[g] and [d] represents stops with slack voice rather than the
regular modal voice. Actually, Danish does not have modally voiced
stops. Modal voice occurs only when these stops are extremely
lenited to a [j] and [D] respectively.

Regards,
-Kristian- 8-)