Miguel:
>Most people have very little voicing going on while the lips are
>closed during either "pie" or "buy." Both stop consonants are
>essentially voiceless.
Let's see... "VERY LITTLE voicing"... "ESSENTIALLY voiceless".
Miguel can't seem to distinguish totality from partiality. That
is a fatal logical error if I've ever seen one.
>The major difference between the words in the first two columns
>is not that one has voiceless stops and the other voiced stops.
>It is that the first column has (voiceless) aspirated stops and
>the second column has (partially voiced) unaspirated stops.
Yes, yes, but I fail to see how this above fact translates into
"The major difference between English 'voiced' and 'voiceless'
stops is aspiration". For the very fact that English stops
are described according to voiced and voiceless shows that you
can't be right.
Plus, you're only speaking about the specific circumstance of
initial position in some specific dialect, not as a whole. And
it's funny but even though "spank" has unaspirated voiceless
[p], English speakers still register it as a _voiceless_ /p/.
Funny eh?
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Throw your lovely aspiration
theory out the window. Voicing is the major contrast behind
"t" and "d" in English, regardless of all this peripheral minutia.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963