Anatolians

Max W Wheeler maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Thu Mar 11 14:30:55 UTC 1999


On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Steven Schaufele wrote:

> What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and
> aspirated (unmarked for voicing)?  Or am i being naive?

Perhaps. If aspirated means `with delayed voice onset time (relative to
stop release)', then an aspirated consonant `unmarked for voicing', i.e.
without contrastive voicing, is likely to have been phonetically
voiceless, certainly in initial position, and perhaps everywhere else
too perceptually. If aspirated does not mean `with delayed voice onset
time', then we're back with considering various possible states of the
glottis. The fact is, it's hard to see what 'state of glottis' could
plausibly give rise to all of [dh] (murmured voiced), [d] ~ [d-]
("edh"), and [th]. Maybe the answer lies in N*******c, or maybe we'll
never know :-(

Max
___________________________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler <maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320
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