intervocalic devoicing in Welsh (?)

[Alan R. King]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>In agreement with Alan King's last message on Welsh intervocalic devoicing,
>I hope that some Welsh experts will indeed enlighten us further on the
>situation.
 
I indeed hope so, but if nobody volunteers and the matter is of sufficient
interest I *could* dig into my books and/or bother a colleague or too to
get some more information.  I would rather not put so much time into this,
though.
 
>Meanwhile, the possibility of the phenomenon raised a question
>of a more general nature in my mind.  I embedded it in my last message, but
>I would like to restate it more elegantly.  It concerns the phonological
>conditions on sound change in the following way.
>
>Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one or more intervocalic voiced
>stops geminate.  Let's express this as:  [+voiced] > [+geminate] / V
>[+stop,__] V
 
Actually if we're looking at the northern Welsh model, the [+voiced] bit is
strictly unnecessary.  The change can be represented simply as: [+stop] >
[+geminate] / V __ V, which I should think is intuitively more plausible.
Of course, this occurred under the circumstance that voiceless stops in the
specified position were already geminate (for diachronic reasons that we've
already been into).
 
Again, relevant to the Welsh phenomenon is the fact that the gemination
probably only occurs when the preceding vowel is stressed, so another
modification is necessary: [+stop] > [+geminate] / [V, +stress] __ V.
 
I would suggest there are two ways of "understanding" this change.  One is
just in the terms implied by the foregoing notation: northern Welsh
speakers "decided" to geminated all stops between a preceding stressed and
a following (unstressed) vowel.  "For fun", so to speak.  The other view
might be that since voiceless stops in that position were already always
geminate, they "decided" to *simplify* their phonological system by
extending the "gemination habit" to all stops, regardless of voicing.
 
Actually they went further than that.  Gemination in the said position was
extended to *most* consonants; notably including /n/, /l/ and /r/.  At this
point we might say that they were really getting "carried away", since
length in these particular consonants (only) had until that time been
phonemic, as it still is in southern Welsh (although phonetically most of
the work to distinguish short and long liquids is probably performed by the
preceding stressed vowel through a compensatory length contrast).
 
So far from doing such a strange thing as geminating intervocalic voiced
stops for no apparent reason, we could say that they pretty much had a
"gemination party", geminating nearly everything they found in the position
/ [V, +stress] __ V.
 
Why?  I don't know if it's a motivation or merely an effect, but the
outcome of this development is a very characteristic *staccato, almost
syncopated* rhythm to northern Welsh speech, since most stressed syllables
are pronounced with a short, rather energetic vowel followed by a long and
also energetically articulated consonant which seems to go
implosion-interruption-explosion.  Interestingly, in some speakers at
least, the intensity of the stressed and the posttonic unstressed vowels
doesn't seem to contrast as much in this "articulatory style" as in, say,
English or even Spanish (so that foreign ears may have difficulty
interpreting which is the stressed syllable), and it now occurs to me that
this may be explained if we assume that the "staccato-ey" features I've
described have taken over the function of identifying the position of the
stress.  In particular it is common for the pitch of the posttonic syllable
to be higher than that of stressed syllable.
 
As I already said previously, stops in general tend to be strictly
voiceless in pronunciation, with other features such as aspiration doing
most of the work of differentiating the voiced and voiceless series.  It
seems to me that in this form of speech intervocalic geminate stops are
*particularly* voiceless: i.e. voicing is interrupted along with everything
else in their intervocalic articulation.  I believe that the voiced and
voiceless series nonetheless remain phonologically fully differentiated in
this pronunciation (although some foreign speakers might be excused, again,
for getting the signals wrong).  But *phonetically* one might argue that
you already have intervocalic devoicing here, at least as a subsidiary
effect - assuming of course that some voicing is there in the voiced stop
series to begin with.
 
And if that is the case, it appears to me that we might describe the
phenomenon as one of dissimilation.  There are surely enough precedents for
that is phonology?  When intervocalic stops get voiced, that is
assimilation to the voicing of the surrounding vowels, I take it; why then,
when the opposite happens it is surely dissimilation.  The motivation might
be to heighten the contrast between adjacent segments: vowels voiced,
consonants unvoiced.
 
Maybe we should look for other instances of *that* phenomenon?
 
Please remember, I repeat, that I am mostly describing my "non-rigorous"
*impressions* in the preceding description.  I am not by training a
phonetician (nor a historical linguist, for that matter).  Caveat emptor.
 
Regards,
Alan