intervocalic devoicing

[Patrick Honeybone]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In connection with the recent discussion on the possibility of
intervocalic devoicing in general, and whether this happened in some
dialects of Welsh in particular, Joe Eska wrote:
 
> I don't have the time at the moment to enter the discussion fully,
> but one thing to bear in mind is that the phonetic realisation of
> phonemes is not identical across languages.  In Welsh, broadly
> speaking, phonemic /p b/, for example, are [p^h p] phonetically,
> i.e., the contrast is one of phonetic aspiration, rather than
> voicing. There is no process of intervocalic devoicing in Welsh, but
> there is one of intervocalic de-aspiration for voiceless stops,
> which, in many dialects, is accompanied by partial voicing.
 
I think that this is an important point, and although Alan King
referred to it a couple of times in some of his contributions (e.g...
 
> 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.
 
... the implications of it weren't taken up. So I thought I'd add my
thoughts.
 
If this is right (and I'm afraid I know woefully little about the
phonology of Welsh myself, so can't comment) then it fits in with an
approach to laryngeal features like [voice] and [aspiration] that's
been firming up recently. This is the idea that in a language with a
two-way distinction in stops (and other obstruents, too, probably, but
most of the work seems to centre on stops), that distinction could be
made in two ways phonologically. Either the language uses [voice] *or*
it uses [aspiration]. This fits in well with phonological theories
that use privative features, but could also be understood as using
[+/- voice] *or* [+/- aspiration].
 
(I should perhaps say at this point that there is some variation among
 proponents of the idea in terms of the names that they give to the
features; some use [aspiration], some [spread glottis], some [tense]
and some (in Government Phonology) 'H' but I think this is not really
a substantial difference).
 
So, using a system like this, people tend to say that most standard
Germanic languages (but not Dutch or even all the dialects of English
or German) characterise the difference using [aspiration] (or
whatever), whereas Romance languages and Slavic tend (again - not
necessarily all of them) to use [voice] instead. The idea also has an
obvious connection with the long tradition of using [fortis/lenis] as
a feature (-pair) rather than [+/- voice] in the Germanic literature.
(A good reference for all this is: Iverson, G. & Salmons, J. (1995).
'Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic'. Phonology 12.
369-396).
 
 
This means that the conventional transcriptions like /t/ and /d/ can
be misleading, because in, say, German, /t/ involves [aspiration] and
/d/ is unspecified (in a privative system) whereas in, say, French,
/d/ involves [voice] and /t/ is unspecified. So /t/ vs. /d/ in German
is not the same opposition as /t/ vs. /d/ in French.
 
And if what Joe Eska and Alan King wrote about Welsh stops is right,
then Welsh looks like it uses [aspiration] and not [voice]. Welsh /t/
> /d/ would not be quite the same kind of change as Romance /t/ > /d/,
nor would a putative Welsh /d/ > /t/ be quite the same as a putative
Romance /d/ > /t/ (which is sort of where we came in).
 
If this is all on the right lines then the different kinds of stops in
the different kinds of languages should have different phonological
effects (and they do seem to) and might well allow different
predictions for the kinds of lenition that the languages could undergo
(and I think they do...).
 
The point of what I'm trying to say is: maybe we should be careful
about comparing changes in different languages - the symbols we use to
transcribe sounds could be pulling the wool over our eyes.
 
 
But I do have more - if I could just go on for a bit longer...
 
This discussion on types of lenition has been very interesting and one
key point is evident in the following exchange between Alan King and
Benji Wald:
 
>>B. Wald says: It just happened -- because both directions
>>are possible (under certain conditions -- certainly NOT ****z > s
>>/V_V). That provoked me to try and think of counterexamples to
>>Benji's latter assertion here.
>
>Good.  If I'm wrong, I'd like to know as soon as possible, so that I
>don't keep on thinking that and misleading other people.  That's my
>best pay-off for my interventions on the list.
>
>He continues:
>
>>I couldn't come up with an example of z > s /V_V, but I
>>did find one of +voice > -voice /V_V.
>
>Just as good.  I would have thought that if such a change occurs it
>can't be due to the intervocalic position (just as in the z > s
>"reversal" case), and would expect it to occur in that position only
>as part of a more general voicing shift (which the intervocalic
>position is not able to resist at the time).
 
I've just read an article by Ernst Jahr which seems relevant to this
point [Jahr, E. H. (1989) 'Language planning and language change' In:
Breivik, L. E. & E. H. Jahr 'Language Change. Contributions to the
Study of its Causes'. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter]. In it, Jahr reports
on a change that looks like [+voice] > [-voice]/ V_V, or at least,
[+voice] > [-voice]/V:_V, in 'upper-class' Oslo Norwegian.
 
The basic details are: in 1880, in words such as the following, with a
long vowel, stop, vowel sequence (and I think it basically really is
just this environment), the stop was voiced in the pronunciation of
this group of people, whereas now the stop is voiceless:
 
                 1880                 now
'creator'        [ska:b at r]            [ska:p at r]
'know'           [vi:d@]              [vi:t@]
'realm'          [ri:k@]              [ri:k@]
 
('@' = schwa)
 
So this looks like it might be an example of the 'unnatural' change
that Benji Wald was looking for. But Jahr connects this with the
language planning movement in Norway and the connected change in the
spelling of the words (they used to have <b>, <d> and <g>, now they
have <p>, <t> and <g>), so it wouldn't count as a 'normal', 'real'
sound change. *And anyway* Norwegian, as far as I'm aware, has
aspiration in 'voiceless' stops and little or no voicing in 'voiced'
stops, so the symbols might be confusing, and ... I think what I'm
trying to say is, even if we did find an example of [+voice] >
[-voice]/ V_V it might be explicable in other ways and not be a
counter-example to lenition tendencies.