--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>

wrote:

> >
> > > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
> >
> > Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> > Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast!

> Believe it or not, there are languages in which voice is not

phonemic.

>
> Is this one of them?

It has contrastive aspiration, which is why I used the
word 'phonation'. The original spelling system indicated a voicing
contrast, but it was probably using near-English values, as in the
way pinyin shows the aspiration of stops. (I don't know enough to
exclude the possbility of /b/ > /ph/ in historic times.)

> > Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the

pronunciations

> > shown in dictionaries.

No. Typical unpredictable places are word-finally and in
intervocalic clusters, which are spelt the same as single
intervocalic consonants. It may be predictable at the start of a
word - I don't remember the details of that.

Richard.