Re: Phonetic contrast between lenis unvoiced and lenis voiced?

On Oct 17, 6:21 pm, "ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx"
<ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 16, 9:46 pm, "benli...@xxxxxxxxxx" <benli...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 17, 5:07 pm, "ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx"
I'm not equipped for experiments, so I took VOTs reported for Mandarin
[b] and [p] whose degree of aspiration seems similar to the
corresponding sound in high Malayalam and interpolated a geometric
series to come up with 2 more VOTs between the two figures.
Naughty! But is there not some actual phonetic research to verify that
these four manners are in contrast?

Not that I know of. I've seen very dated discussion (such as from
Kuiper's time) about degree of voicing in Tamil such as whether to
describe the pronunciation of /anpu/ as [VnpU] or [anbU] or something
inbetween but these observations were from an era before measurements
were made. Tamil, though, doesn't have aspirated consonants or indeed
more than one stop phoneme at any given point of articulation, so
discussions of Tamil would have to be about what the allophones of a
stop phoneme are.

If it could be demonstrated that these stops had "allophones"
conditioned by the etymology of the word in question, that would be a
most interesting finding.


All of what you're talking about is spelling pronunciation. What
"should" Brahui be (in English)?

[br.Vhwi] is what it is to one Pakistani English speaker (I've heard
it only from one person).

Well this runs into more than one difficulty from an English point of
view. I think "brahooey" is probably about the best one can do.

Now, I remember that he said that [brVhwi] is a formal pronunciation
and that it's also called by other names such as [brAwi], [bro:hi],
[bru:hi] and [bIru:hi]. He was a security guard but literally
inclined; he published his own magazine with a small circulation.

The first of these pronunciations can be rendered quite nicely in
English by <brahwi>. As a bonus, this spelling would also facilitate
rendering the formal pronunciation by the cognoscenti that be.

I don't see that changing one letter would make it significantly
easier for the "cognoscenti" (i.e. those who had access to a knowledge
of the original pronunciation either by hearing it or reading a
phonetic transcription) to render it in English. And the proposed
spelling would be more likely to lead to something like "bra-wee" or
"brow-y" among the other 99.9% of the population.

Ross Clark
.