intervocalic devoicing

[Roger Wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
Alan King says:
 
>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. ... 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.
 
There is, or was, a scheme whereby two such Patagonians a year had a
scholarship to attend Bangor University (North Wales). Part of the point
of this, for the linguists, is that Welsh is now spoken almost only by
bilinguals, and perhaps the "pure" Welsh is that which can be deduced to
be the highest common factor of the Welsh-Spanish and Welsh-English
bilinguals.
 
>  ....  is their pronunciation of the stops, since the more
>recent generations, who are Spanish speaking, apparently assimilated the
>Welsh system to the Castilian one.
 
Argentinian Spanish isn't very Castilian, but, yes, it still has the
voicing opposition, normally without aspiration. (Although some
Castilian specialists prefer to think the contrast usually called one of
voicing is essentially a tense-lax opposition).
                                RW