Voiced aspirated plosives (was: phonetic)

On Tuesday, January 4, 2005, at 09:17 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Ray Brown wrote:
>
>>>> And there voiced equivalent? can a voiced plosive be
>>>> aspirated?
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes.
>>
>>
>> Yes - they are common in the Indic languages.
>
> They are strictly speaking breathy-voiced,
> a peculiar kind of phonation in the larynx.
> Aspiration is strictly delayed voice onset, and
> that is of course not possible between a voiced
> stop and a following (voiced) vowel.
Indeed not - I had assumed in the Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu _bh_, _dh_ etc. the
_h_ was voiced, i.e. [h\] (IPA [ɦ]) - after all, [h\] is not exactly an
uncommon sound.

But your description of "breathy-voiced, a peculiar kind of phonation in
the larynx" sounds like the 'creaky-voiced' or laryngealized sounds I
referred to later in my reply:
>>>> When a phonetic symbol has a ~ under it, it makes
>>>> that it is "creaky voiced"
>>>> but what does it means?
>>>
>>> No idea how to explain this... you say it as if you
>>> have laryngitis, I guess. Like you've something caught
>>> in your throat.
>>
>> In fact these sounds are often described as 'laryngealized'. The sounds
>> are produced by a slow vibration of only one end of the vocal chords.
>> Hausa distinguishes between creaky (laryngealized) plosives and
>> non-creaky
>> plosives.
So are the voiced aspirated plosives of the Indic languages in fact the
same as the laryngealized plosives of Hausa?

So how is the Urdu/Hindi _bhai_ (brother) pronounced? Is it [b_h\ai] or
[b_kai] or [b_kh\ai] or what? Are there perhaps variations in dialect and
in different Indic languages?

It always struck me as rather odd that PIE was credited with a series of
voiceless plosives, voiced unaspirated and voiced aspirated plosives, but
no voiceless aspirated plosives. I know it makes sense from a backward
reconstruction from the 'daughter' languages, but it did seem an odd
system for a language to have. I know PIE linguistics have moved on since
I was last seriously looked at them. What is the present state of play, so
to speak, regarding the PIE 'voiced aspirated' plosives?

Ray
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