Oh those booths

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Jules Levin wrote:

> Alas, you and many others have fallen for the myth of +/- Voice in
> English. The consonants s ~ z, theta ~ ethe, etc., differ by the
> feature Tense ~ Lax. In the normal pronunciation of 'dogs', the
> devoicing of the final cluster is clearly visible on sound
> spectrographs. The vowel is /lengthened /before the lax consonants
> and the final vocal cord vibrations peter out before the final [z] is
> reached. The acoustic signal for native speakers is the vowel
> length. You can easily test this by just lengthening the vowel in
> minimal pairs such as 'his' ~ 'hiss', 'bad' ~ 'bat', while devoicing
> the final consonant. No native speaker will notice. You can do this
> acoustically by actually replacing the final consonant--no loss of
> contrast! I am not sure, but I think Trubetzkoy endorses this in
> /Principes de Phonologie/ (Sorry, read it in French, not German.)

Yes and no.

If Konstantin was asking for the phonemic assignment of these consonants 
(I think he was), then by phonotactic rule they must agree: either /-θs/ 
or /-ðz/, never */-ðs/ or */-θz/. Whether they are phonetically [±voice] 
or [±tense] is irrelevant to that question.

As for the phonetics, it depends a lot on what follows: an utterance 
boundary, a phrase boundary, a morpheme boundary, etc. In a phrase like 
"the booths are full," it is unlikely that a speaker using /ð/ would 
devoice/tense the /z/ before the following vowel, and a speaker who 
normally has /θ/ in isolation might well voice the cluster 
intervocalically. The results will be quite different in "We emptied the 
booths."

And of course I don't need to tell you about variation between dialects, 
idiolects, and pure random variation from utterance to utterance. A 
native listener is so biased in favor of what makes sense that he tunes 
out most of this noise and hears what the speaker should have said even 
if he didn't actually say it.

You're right for American English that vowel length is a major cue to 
voicing/laxness of a final consonant, but at the systematic level, it's 
hard to argue that initial consonants are /±tense/ since there is no 
corresponding phonetic cue. Is aspiration a marker of "tenseness"? Not 
after /s/...

For the past few years, I've been studying Korean, which has three 
series of initial voiceless stops, and two of these are described as 
"tense unaspirated" and "lax unaspirated." Damned if I can tell. ;-) 
It's not what I listen for, and it's not what they listen for. Here's a 
sample: copy/paste the text below into Google Translate and hit the 
"listen" button.

김 킴 낌 김 킴 낌 김 킴 낌

Official romanizations: gim kim kkim gim kim kkim gim kim kkim

The initial stops in syllables 1, 4, and 7 are described in the 
literature as "lax unaspirated," but phonetically you'll hear some 
aspiration and a depression of the pitch next to the consonant. Those in 
syllables 2, 5, and 8 are described in the literature as "tense 
aspirated," and they induce an elevation of pitch. Those in syllables 3, 
6, and 9 are described as "tense unaspirated," and are also associated 
with pitch elevation.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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