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Languages w/o Voice Being a Distinction?

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20 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3 
Yurk
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 Message 17 of 20
17 February 2011 at 6:35am | IP Logged 
Warp3 wrote:
Korean (which it appears you are studying) is somewhat like this. Voicing in Korean is often
more based on the prosody of the word/phrase/sentence rather than the consonant itself. For example, take the
word 가격 (price). If spoken in isolation, the first and last ㄱ would be unvoiced (thus sounding more "k" like), but
the middle ㄱ is voiced (thus sounding more "g" like). Add a subject marker to the end (making it 가격이) and
suddenly the 3rd ㄱ is voiced as well.

Sure, you might sound a bit odd if you got the voicing wrong (since the prosody of the sentence would be off),
but as long as the tenseness and aspiration is right (which are the primary source of differentiation for Korean
consonants, rather than voicing), you are still likely to be understood (depending on the context, of course).


I thought of Korean, but avoided going further into it. My grasp on Korean phonology and phonetics is a bit weak,
and I'm only at the intermediate level with the language as a whole. Although [t] is primarily syllable final, a few
speakers I know (about half) will leave the pronounce ㅌ unaspirated in syllable initial position.

So for example, I'm pretty sure saying unaspirated [t] 태양 [tɛjaŋ] vs [dɛjaŋ] 대양 will be interpreted as the first.
Same for 통 and 동. I don't really know how this fits in though.

Cainntear wrote:
You'll still a fair few English courses teaching "I have" as "correct" and dismissing "I've got"
as "colloquialism" or "slang". There's still a lot of people teaching nonsense in English like "never end a sentence
with a preposition" and "don't split your infinitives".

Gaelic's no better, so the books continue to publish the rules that books before them gave. Gaelic's also had less
academic attention than English, so many of the rules of natural Gaelic aren't known for sure yet. The rule that
"BH"="MH"="V" is fairly old, but the Modern English V is fairly recent, anyway. What was the V pronounced like
when the first person said "BH is like V"? I don't know. So it's not particularly useful as a rule.


I thought that type of teaching was for the most part done. Outdated.

And are you implying that the English V influenced this Scottish Gaelic pronunciation? I thought you were just
using that as a point of reference for the way those teachers speak.
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Spasty
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 Message 18 of 20
24 February 2011 at 8:07am | IP Logged 
If I remember correctly, there are no languages that have voiced consonants but no voiceless. However, it's perfectly possible to have languages with only voiceless stops, though finding well-known/common languages that has this feature is a bit more difficult.

A couple common-ish (as in, some people might have heard of them) languages I can find are Hawaiian and Cherokee. Though I'm not entirely sure why you're searching for languages that fit these criteria.

Also, Korean does technically count, but I don't think the contrast between three different types of stops (and voice not being one of the contrasts!) is exactly what the OP is looking for.
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mrwarper
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 Message 19 of 20
26 February 2011 at 12:31pm | IP Logged 
getreallanguage wrote:
Spanish lacks phonemic voicing distinction on its fricatives and its affricate. Its stops do feature phonemic distinction by voice ( /p t k b d g/ ). However all the voiced stops have voiced fricative allophones between vowels, and moreover, in certain circumstances (between vowels) the unvoiced stops become voiced and fricativized. Both processes also occur across word boundaries.

The first process is absolutely normativized and is often completely invisible to native speakers. The second process can potentially carry a sociolinguistic marker, which leads to stereotyping of people who are perceived to do this. To be fair, every speaker does it at least sometimes. It's the frequency, or perceived frequency, of the phenomenon which can lead to this sociolinguistic labeling.


Could you please elaborate on sounds? Like /f/ becomes /v/ etc. if I understood correctly. I don't think I've ever heard that, so I'd be very interested.

And what stereotyping are you talking about? Maybe it's an Argentinian thing?

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getreallanguage
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 Message 20 of 20
26 February 2011 at 4:29pm | IP Logged 
mrwarper wrote:
getreallanguage wrote:
Spanish lacks phonemic voicing distinction on its fricatives and its affricate. Its stops do feature phonemic distinction by voice ( /p t k b d g/ ). However all the voiced stops have voiced fricative allophones between vowels, and moreover, in certain circumstances (between vowels) the unvoiced stops become voiced and fricativized. Both processes also occur across word boundaries.

The first process is absolutely normativized and is often completely invisible to native speakers. The second process can potentially carry a sociolinguistic marker, which leads to stereotyping of people who are perceived to do this. To be fair, every speaker does it at least sometimes. It's the frequency, or perceived frequency, of the phenomenon which can lead to this sociolinguistic labeling.


Could you please elaborate on sounds? Like /f/ becomes /v/ etc. if I understood correctly. I don't think I've ever heard that, so I'd be very interested.

And what stereotyping are you talking about? Maybe it's an Argentinian thing?


I was talking specifically about stop phonemes ( /p t k b d g/ ). It breaks down like this:

/b/ has the allophones [ b ] and [β] (the first is a stop and the second a fricative)

/d/ has the allophones [d] and [ð]

/g/ has the allophones [g] and [ɣ]

As a general rule the fricative allophones occur between vowels, even across word boundaries. However they also occur in many other contexts, like in contact with certain consonants, and those rules also apply across word boundaries, leading to the following rule:

The phonemes /b d g/ are realized as fricatives in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant or — in the case of /d/ — after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as plosives.

However, sometimes /p t k/ can also be pronounced as [β] [ð] [ɣ] in those contexts, particularly between vowels, and apparently more often (though not exclusively) word internally. This seems to be a constant in romance languages (just like the previous rule) and has led to certain historical phonetic developments like Latin APOTECA becoming BODEGA in Spanish (most likely through an intermediate form ABODEGA).

Like I said, the fricativizing of voiced plosives in certain contexts is so natural in Spanish as to be practically invisible to most native speakers.

However, the high frequency of voicing-fricativizing of unvoiced plosives seems to be regarded, here in the Buenos Aires area, as one of the many markings of 'low class' speech. To be fair, everybody does it to a certain extent, but of course people who don't consider themselves 'low class' will swear up and down they don't do it, and it seems like it has to do more with the frequency of the phenomenon than anything else.

I actually have a youtube video about these phenomenons affecting /p t k b d g/ on my youtube channel, which you can find under my username. If you're not in the mood to sit through my explanation, the video description can still be useful, since I pretty much explain what I just did, only with a lot more examples using actual words.

Now, as for fricatives like /f s θ/, they can become voiced before other voiced consonants, according to my sources. In my dialect (Rioplatense) I can vouch for /f/ potentially becoming [v] (AFGANISTÁN). As for /s/ becoming [z], I've heard other people do it (Mexicans, for example) in words like RASGO, but it doesn't happen, at least not often, in Rioplatense since we just aspirate /s/ before other consonants, so in those contexts /s/ becomes [h]. There is no /θ/ in my dialect so I'd have to ask the castizo speakers among us to corroborate.

Edited by getreallanguage on 26 February 2011 at 4:54pm


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