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Languages w/o Voice Being a Distinction? | ||
Tags: Phonetics | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Yurk Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5527 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Azerbaijani Studies: Modern Hebrew, Sign Language, Korean, Spanish, Indonesian, Irish Studies: French | Message 9 of 20 15 February 2011 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Really? So is there a standard Scottish Gaelic that the book uses, based on some other dialect, or is it artificial? In
any case, the dialect that doesn't have the MH or BH sound articulated as a labiodental one might actually work for me. Do you happen to know the name of the dialect or just where's it's spoken? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5364 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 10 of 20 15 February 2011 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are lots of languages that lack phonemic voice distinction. It's common among Native American languages like Cree and Cherokee, as well as Austronesian languages like Hawaiian and Māori.
I seem to remember a claim of an Australian Aboriginal language that was pronounced entirely with voiced sounds, but I can't remember what language it was or where I read that. In any case, it's much more the exception than the rule. In languages that lack phonemic voicing, you typically find voiced sonorants (as in pretty much every language) and unvoiced obstruents, though the obstruents have a tendency to be pronounced with voice when sandwiched between two sonorants. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Yurk Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5527 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Azerbaijani Studies: Modern Hebrew, Sign Language, Korean, Spanish, Indonesian, Irish Studies: French | Message 11 of 20 16 February 2011 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Levi! I've actually found several examples now. I just really didn't know where to begin looking
earlier. I don't know what language that claim you saw spoke of, but reading up on Dyirbal seems to at least point in that direction; voiced consonants are more common than unvoiced even though there's no distinction. Edited by Yurk on 16 February 2011 at 12:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5268 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 12 of 20 16 February 2011 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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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. Edited by getreallanguage on 16 February 2011 at 4:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| karaipyhare Tetraglot Groupie Paraguay Joined 5382 days ago 74 posts - 150 votes Speaks: Portuguese, Spanish*, English, Guarani Studies: German, Italian, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 20 16 February 2011 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Guarani doesn't have a plain voiced/unvoiced distinction between plosives, instead, it
has unvoiced plosives P T K and prenasalized plosives MB NT NG. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5332 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 14 of 20 16 February 2011 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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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). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5808 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 20 16 February 2011 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||
The language in language books has always been a bit of a self-sustaining myth. 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. Anyway, in Barra, the BH is a funny bilabial fricative with the lips pulled in towards the teeth, so a not-quite-W sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| horshod Pentaglot Groupie India Joined 5567 days ago 74 posts - 107 votes Speaks: Hindi, Marathi*, Bengali, Gujarati, English Studies: German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 16 of 20 16 February 2011 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tamil almost doesn't (in some cases it does) make the distinction between voiced and
voiceless consonants. It has both the sounds but a single letter to represent both of the same class. k/g = க் ch/j = ச் T/D (retroflex) = ட் t/d (dental) = த் p/b = ப் I have heard different native speakers pronounce these consonants as voiced or unvoiced at different times. Although there is sort of a rule which says that the letter is unvoiced at the beginning of the word and voiced otherwise (with some exceptions). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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