Re: What's the different between /tS/ as one phoneme and as two?

From: Nathan Sanders (nsanders.DIE.SPAM_at_wso.williams.edu)
Date: 07/19/04 

Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:51:41 GMT

In article <2ttnf093qp7bkpp9lqip7l6l6vuuir7rif@4ax.com>,
 Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Nathan Sanders writes:
>
> > In English, at the beginning of words: aspiration.
> >
> > In French, at the beginning of words: obstruent voicing.
>
> I meant acoustic differences, as seen in a spectral analysis.

Aspiration shows up as white noise (aperiodic sound).

Obstruent voicing shows up as a "voicing bar", a low frequency
periodic wave.

> Is there anything about the respective pronunciations of these two
> consonants in the two languages that would lead to confusion?

Essentially, an English /b/ at the beginning of a word is acoustically
similar to a French /p/ at the beginning of a word.

> It seems to me that the real difference between the two consonants, in
> both languages, is that vocal chords vibrate for one, but not for the
> other.

There is no significant vocal cord vibration in English plosives at
the beginning of a word. The difference between them is what happens
after the plosive is released (aspiration for initial /p/, no
aspiration for initial /b/).

But aspiration is irrelevant for final /p/ and /b/, and sometimes
relevant for medial /p/ and /b/ (depends on stress and syllable
structure).

Nathan 

-- 
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program       nsanders@wso.williams.edu                           
Williams College          http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders
Williamstown, MA 01267

Relevant Pages