Re: Danish VOT

2008/11/11 Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
On 2008-11-10 Lars Finsen wrote:
>> the long intervocalic stops, those that paradoxically are written _kk_, _pp_ and
>> _tt_, are fully voiced, not perceptibly less voiced than the Norwegian voiced
>> stops.

There are no phonemic long consonants in Danish; double writing is
solely a sign that the preceding vowel phoneme is short. (But there
are doubled consonants at morpheme boundaries, and lots of fully
assimilated consonant pairs, both of which phenomenee can give the
impression of consonant length).


> I just got my hands on a little book I warmly
> recommend:
You lost this:
Author: Nina Grønnum
Title: Rødgrød med fløde

> Type:     Book; Danish
> Publisher:      København : Akademisk Forlag, (c)2007.
> Editions:       3 Editions
> ISBN:   8750039180 9788750039181
> OCLC:   145568215
> Related Subjects:       Danish language -- Phonetics.

> [^1]: I've come to the conclusion that we
> probably have an instinctive notion that
> voiced stops are the most typical (as in most
> distinctive) lenes which creates this
> illusion.  The gods know it's hard to unlearn,
> but it gets us dead wrong when listening to
> Danish -- and most Romance varieties: in the
> dialect of Rome intervocalic /p t tS k/ are or
> can be [b_0 d_0 dZ_0 g_0] while /b d dZ g/
> are fully voiced.  I heard them all as
> 'voiced' and assumed a merger, which my
> Italian acquaintances vehemently denied.
> It just so happened that I was conditioned
> by my L1 to hear those two phone types as
> 'the same'.

The funny thing is that the same happens for Danes, or at least for
me: Without strong aspiration, I tend to hear /p/ as [b_0], and since
voicing is allophonic in Danish, that registers as a /b/.

--
Lars

Reply