Re: [tied] English "voiced" stops

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 13:03:35 +0000, "Glen Gordon"
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>Miguel:

(Peter Ladefoged, actually)

>>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.

I'm just saying that it's silly to talk about initial or final English
/b/, /d/ and /g/ as if they were voiced, when they are "essentially
voiceless". I have never denied that voice sets on at around the time
of release. But if a sound is 90% devoiced and 10% voiced (to be
generous), I would still describe it as "unvoiced", essentially.

>>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.

That merely shows that Latin terminology is still not dead.

>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 should have scanned the whole of page 50 from Ladefoged's course in
phonetics. You are apparently unfamilar with the classroom experiment
Ladefoged describes there. Record the words "spy, sty, sky, spill,
still, skill", cut of the /s-/'es and play them back. Have an
English-speaking audience write down what they hear: "buy, die, guy,
bill, dill, gill".

>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...

...what the phoneticists say. No.


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