Re: [tied] Laryngeal theory as an unnatural

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:47:24 +0000, Glen Gordon
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>Miguel:
>>It's indeed a question of voice onset time and tongue position.
>>Mandarin and English /d/ are unvoiced, while French /d/ is voiced.
>
>That's not correct.

Yes it is. See the discussion starting with message #16631.

>But in general, Mandarin /d/ and /t/ differ in aspiration as we
>find in Sumerian or Etruscan.

Funny. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare Mandarin with living
languages, such as English or Danish, rather than dead ones, where we
know very little about the actual phonetics?

What's your evidence for Sumerian?

Etruscan orthography has no <d>, just <t> and <th>. Etruscan-derived
scripts such as Venetic seem to use <th> for /d/, so there is the
possibility that this was also the case in Etruscan itself.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...