Danish Spelling

[David L. White]

> Which phoneme do those plain voiceless stops belong to? They sound
> exactly like the /bdg/ you get in initial position. They don't sound
> like initial /ptk/. So why shouldn't <stave> (spell) be /sda:u/?

        Because "d" is not the IPA symbol for any voiceless stop.

        But what I was working up to here, before I got derailed by my own
errors, was that the spelling of Gaelic, and "phonetic" transcription of
Danish) indicate that an original contrast of voice can be re-analyzed as a
contrast of aspiration, in which case spellings like "sg-" and
"transcriptions" like [sd-] can make sense.

Dr. David L. White