intervocalic devoicing

[Alan R. King]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Having read Patrick Honeybone's latest contribution to the discussion I
(rather unwittingly) triggered off, I have probably little of substance to
add, but just a couple of related questions and thoughts.
 
Just for clarification, if anyone cares: I am not a specialist in the
subject of this discussion (as I've said several times already), and
furthermore I haven't got a theory to defend, I'm more of an onlooker
sitting on the sidelines and throwing in an idea or two, for what (if
anything) it's worth, from time to time.  And as such, if I make any silly
mistakes, I expect to be corrected.
 
On the question of aspiration versus voicing in Welsh:
 
>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.
 
I confirm once again, that according to every phonological description I've
ever seen, as well as my own acoustic impressions (the effect is
unmistakable, at least if you know a minimum about phonetics and your ear
is accustomed to hearing a language with a *voicing* opposition, as is my
case): in Welsh stops there is definitely a contrast, and no doubt an
opposition, in terms of aspiration, while voicing would seem to be
secondary (if the contrast is there at all in phonological terms).  In most
contexts all stops sound pretty voiceless.
 
The proof of the pudding is that there is, or was, an important colony of
(originally, anyway) Welsh speakers, dating from a hundred years ago, in
the Patagonia region of Argentina.  Believe it or not (this is such a
fascinating story, I can't resist telling it), the original emigrants are
said to have moved in an organised attempt to ensure that the Welsh
language remained alive *somewhere* in the world even if it disappeared in
Wales, and had the permission and complicity of the Argentinean government
to colonise a region of pampa (and some indigenous inhabitants, it should
be added) to this end.  Life being what it is, nowadays Spanish seems to
have taken over most functions in Welsh Patagonia, which has been largely
Argentineanized by now, but there is still a significant residue of
maintenance of group identity and even some linguistic maintenance.
Predictably, the Welsh back in Wales find all this very interesting, and
some of the Patagonians are drawn to their ancestral homeland, so some ties
exist.
 
Okay, back to Welsh stops.  I've never actually met a Patagonian, but from
what I've heard, the Welsh in Wales have a notion of what a "Patagonian"
accent is, and one of the most salient features by which "you can tell them
apart immediately" is their pronunciation of the stops, since the more
recent generations, who are Spanish speaking, apparently assimilated the
Welsh system to the Castilian one.  Presumably the younger Patagonians have
no difficulty with proverbial obstacles to the acquisition of Welsh
pronunciation such as its famous voiceless lateral fricative, but are
unable to aspirate a /p/!  (Or more likely, are unable to *not* voice a /b/
while still keeping it distinct from a voiceless aspirated /p/.)  By
several reports, native speakers of Romance languages who learn to speak
Welsh fairly well all sound like "Patagonians" to the native Welsh.
 
>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...).
 
Maybe we should try to be more explicit about the kinds of change we are
predicting to be possible in each kind of phonological system.  Let's take
this set of four logical possibilities for the kind of distinction in stops
and the theoretical possibility of intervocalic "lenition" (admitting, for
convenience, that "lenition" might, until demonstrated otherwise, be either
voicing or deaspiration) and "de-lenition" (with apologies: I just made the
word up, to denote the reverse change):
 
AC:
voicing distinction in stops
intervocalic stops may lenite
 
AD:
voicing distinction in stops
intervocalic stops may de-lenite
 
BC:
aspiration distinction in stops
intervocalic stops may lenite
 
BD:
aspiration distinction in stops
intervocalic stops may de-lenite
 
Which of these conditional relations between the type of distiction in
stops and the possibility of a certain type of change are we hypothesizing
to be true?  If I understand him, Patrick Honeybone suggests the following:
+AC, -AD, +BD (i.e., in voicing systems, stops may lenite but cannot
de-lenite, while in aspiration systems, stops may de-lenite).  He doesn't
say anything about BC: in aspiration systems is lenition also admitted?  I
would think it both theoretically and methodologically interesting to
encompass this question in such a hypothesis: it would certainly give you
more predictions to test.
 
On the other hand, I think there is a danger in being excessively
categorical in matters like this, things may not be so black and white.
One way in which this is true was pointed out by Patrick Honeybone in the
last point in his message:
 
>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.
 
Precisely.  Examples such as this one, which is very nice, give me much
pause for thought.  However, I would emphasise that this sort of problem is
by no means limited to cases where language planning as such has
intervened.  I am reminded of the (only apparent) enigma in the evolution
of modern English vowels.  I don't remember the details, but around about
he seventeenth (?) century there is every indication that the vowels in
"sea" and "say" had merged, while that in "see" remained distinct; whereas
in present-day English, the first two have miraculously become
differentiated once again, and it is "sea" and "see" that are homophonous.
Now as far as I know the only way to solve this paradox must involve the
fact that languages are heterogeneous systems at many levels; in other
words, historical sociology must be invoked of necessity.  It seems fairly
obvious that what happened is that there were several phonological
varieties of English in coexistence and, at some point, competing for
acceptance as the prestige and/or "official" model.  My own sobering
conclusion is that, in any language at any time, beneath the "calm" surface
of a language's "general" description, there are undoubtedly undercurrents
that may be far more turbulent (and which seriously affect the fishing, I
expect!).
 
So one question I'd like to ask is: okay, present-day Welsh stops
(Patagonian Welsh excepted) have an "aspiration" system.  But for how long
has this been the case in the history of Welsh?  I myself have no idea.
What I do know, partly thanks to Patrick Honeybone, is that, for example,
some Germanic languages are "aspirating", but some are "voicing"; it
follows that in the history of the various Germanic languages, some must
have shifted from one type to the other.  In which languages, when, and
what type do we think Proto-Germanic was?  Furthermore, since changes
occurred, some languages at some stages must have been in transition.  More
interestingly (or worryingly), the "transition" may have consisted of
periods of heterogeneity and internal competition within the language.
Extending that principle: if Welsh, most Germanic, etc. are "aspirating",
but Romance, most Slavic, etc. are "voicing", then some of all these
languages must also have shifted type at some stage or other.
 
So my general question is: how confident can the historical linguist be in
(a) asserting and (b) demonstrating constraints on language change such as
these?  Granting that the constraints on changes are true per se at a
micro-level, it would seem that the cumulative factors that may have
influenced the final outcome of an observable change in a language at the
macro-level are always potentially capable of scrambling things to the
extent that prediction cannot be confidently maintained.  There is the
"Patagonian factor": articulation habits may be altered quite suddenly, in
structurally unpredictable ways.  There is the "see-sea-say" factor: owing
to "shifting undercurrents", a language can perform apparent about-turns,
even in violation of historical linguistic "laws".  There is the
heterogeneity factor which explains this: generalizations may not be as
generalizable as they appear across dialectal or sociolinguistic varieties.
 There is also the notational factor observed by Patrick Honeybone: "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".  And so on.
 
It is because I perceive such a mass of potentially conflicting factors in
real-life linguistic evolution that I tend to balk at assertions in
historical linguistics like that of Benji's which sparked off this debate:
 
>It just happened -- because both directions
>are possible (under certain conditions -- certainly NOT ****z > s
>/V_V).
 
and, when confronted by such, am usually led to a position of devil's
advocate:
 
>That provoked me to try and think of counterexamples to
>Benji's latter assertion here.
 
Perhaps, strictly speaking, I failed to come up with an instance of
intervocalic DEVOICING.  Nonetheless, I feel that the ensuing debate has
brought to the forefront to what extent a priori diachronic laws probably
require a great deal of qualification and specification, so much so that, I
suspect, their empirical verifiability could be doubtful.
 
Alan