Re: Danish VOT

Lars Mathiesen wrote:

> quoting me:
>>> 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).
You sure about this? In the TV programme I mentioned, the
pronunciation of the stops in words written with single intervocalic
stops (apart from those that are dropped or affricated, of course)
was dramatically different from those with the double ones mentioned
above. In the former case, the consonant was of very brief duration
and the voicing was barely audible, I'm still not quite sure I heard
it (especially since it's a couple of days ago already), while in the
latter case the voicing was very strong indeed and quite
unmistakable, and the duration seemed to be markedly longer.

LEF

Reply