# Aurally distinguish a surd (unaspirated) from a sonant? Really?



## Villeggiatura

When listening to an unaspirated voiceless stop consonant and a voiced one, the native speakers of languages that aspirate (like English) can't tell the difference like the native speakers of languages that don't aspirate (like Romance languages) do.

Yet I'm puzzled by the number of the surd-> sonant changes occurred during the corruption from Latin to Romance languages, e.g. ,
c/q->g
aequalis -> igual(Portuguese & Spanish) égal (French) uguale (Italian)
draco -> drago(I.) dragon (F.)  dragón (S.) dragão (P.)
ficus -> figo (P.) figue (F.)  higo (S.)
lacus -> lago (I.  P.&S.)

p->b
Aprilis -> abril (P.& S.)
caput -> cabo (P.& S.)
lupus ->lobo (P.& S.)
opprobrium -> obbrobrio (I.)

t->d
scutum -> scudo (I.)  escudo (P. & S.)
-tas (genitive -tatis) -> -dade (P.) -dad (S.)
-atus (passive participle) -> -ado (P. & S.)

Were these the results of mishearing?

Without prior knowledge of the correct spelling, could a native speaker of a Romance language always (or almost) aurally distinguish an unaspirated voiceless stop consonant (pronounced by a native speaker) from a voiced one?

It would be interesting to run an experiment like this:
having two native speakers of one Romance language, Person A & Person B;
Person A is to read a set of made-up words (things like galtod tupoca bedonti...) provided by a third person ex tempore;
Person A is supposed to be articulate, reading in a reasonable speed, not to emphasize or to de-emphasize the differences between surds and sonants;
Person B is to write down what he hears.

I' m not saying experiments like this would be conclusive because:
no matter how successful or unsuccessful Person B were in differentiating the surds & sonants, and how proper Person A's pronunciation were, there would be all kinds of suspicions and objections.

[Moderator's Note: Moved from the All Languages forum]


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## Penyafort

Calling it a case of mishearing looks to me, let's say, a bit far-fetched. 

The voicing of stops in between vowels has traditionally been considered a characteristic of West Romance languages (in the West/East split), many pointing to the Celtic substrate. But then there are languages in the Pyrenees and Southern Italy which are exceptions to that 'rule'.

Some rather point to an internal evolution, a sort of chain of events, in which if double -kk- would simplify to -k-, then simple -k- would change into -g-. And there'd be no need for a Celtic substrate for that.

Regarding how well they can be distinguished, well, there are many minimal pairs. Although it's true that b/d/g in languages like Spanish or Catalan sound different when they are between vowels, as they become approximants in those contexts. Those are perceived as mere allophones by native speakers, but might be a way of distinguishing them from devoiced stops even better, after all. It's also an easy way of detecting 'foreign' speakers, as they would pronounce both b's in _baba _in the same way.


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## Villeggiatura

Thank you for your insight.

Initial surd -> sonant changes also occured, e.g.,
Callipolis -> Galípoli (P.& S.) Gallipoli (I.)
cattus -> gato (P.& S.) gatto (I.)
pruina -> brina(I.)
though, it's safe to say they're not as many as the intervocalic ones.
BTW
What do you think of the proposed experiment/challenge (which, admittedly, might not be conclusive) ?


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## frugnaglio

Penyafort said:


> Although it's true that b/d/g in languages like Spanish or Catalan sound different when they are between vowels, as they become approximants in those contexts.



True, but this doesn't happen in (the standard variety of) Italian, and the difference is nonetheless very well recognizable.



Villeggiatura said:


> What do you think of the proposed experiment/challenge (which, admittedly, might not be conclusive) ?



You'd get close to 100% accuracy, if not for slips of the tongue or simple mistakes.

Since you have this doubt, what is your mother language?


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## Penyafort

Villeggiatura said:


> What do you think of the proposed experiment/challenge (which, admittedly, might not be conclusive) ?



I think it wouldn't mean a real problem. As I said, there are quite a few minimal pairs with that distinction, many being common.



frugnaglio said:


> True, but this doesn't happen in (the standard variety of) Italian, and the difference is nonetheless very well recognizable.



Yes, I only pointed to that phenomenon as a possibility for further differentiation, even if unnecessary, otherwise it should also have taken place with initial ones.

Standard Italian, however, keeps many geminated consonant sounds, while West Iberian languages clearly dislike those.


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## Cenzontle

With regard to voiced & voiceless, aspirated & unaspirated stops, some linguists have looked at them in terms of "voice-onset time".
This refers to the moment when the vocal cords start vibrating *relative to *the moment when the stop is released.  
If voicing begins several milliseconds before the stop release, the stop is heard as voiced; 
if voicing doesn't begin until many milliseconds after the release, then the stop is voiceless, and the delay in voicing is heard as aspiration.  
If V.O.T. and release are simultaneous, then the stop is phonetically ambiguous with respect to voicing, 
but perhaps understood as /d/ in a language with an aspirated /t/, or as (unaspirated) /t/ in a language whose /d/ has an early V.O.T.  
The key to phonemic distinction is that, in each language, there is some minimum difference between the V.O.T. of /d/ and that of /t/.  
It's hard to explain briefly, and I would refer you to the Wikipedia article "Voice-onset time".

"Corruption" is not the usual linguistic term for the natural, inexorable changes of pronunciation over time.  
Transmission of phonology across the generations is imperfect, and I suppose to that extent we could chalk this up to "mishearing" and "mispronunciation".  
It's neither good nor bad, it just happens.


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## Nino83

Villeggiatura said:


> Without prior knowledge of the correct spelling, could a native speaker of a Romance language always (or almost) aurally distinguish an unaspirated voiceless stop consonant (pronounced by a native speaker) from a voiced one?



Yes, we do!
We are full of minimal pairs, for example dato (data) vs. dado (dice), moto (motion, motorcycle) vs. modo (way, manner), Appia (a street of the Roman Empire) vs. abbia (present subjunctive of the verb to have, as in "they asked he *have*), pacato (quite) vs. pagato (past participle, payed).



Penyafort said:


> But then there are languages in the Pyrenees and Southern Italy which are exceptions to that 'rule'.



It's not true for Southern Italy (I don't know about Pyrenees). In Sicilian (but also in Neapolitan and other Southern Italian languages) there is phonological opposition between /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/, with many minimal pairs. 
But it's true that in these languages there were less intervocalic vocalization of unvoiced stops from Vulgar Latin but there are minimal pairs.


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## frugnaglio

Cenzontle said:


> With regard to voiced & voiceless, aspirated & unaspirated stops, some linguists have looked at them in terms of "voice-onset time".
> This refers to the moment when the vocal cords start vibrating *relative to *the moment when the stop is released.
> If voicing begins several milliseconds before the stop release, the stop is heard as voiced;
> if voicing doesn't begin until many milliseconds after the release, then the stop is voiceless, and the delay in voicing is heard as aspiration.
> If V.O.T. and release are simultaneous, then the stop is phonetically ambiguous with respect to voicing,
> but perhaps understood as /d/ in a language with an aspirated /t/, or as (unaspirated) /t/ in a language whose /d/ has an early V.O.T.
> The key to phonemic distinction is that, in each language, there is some minimum difference between the V.O.T. of /d/ and that of /t/.
> It's hard to explain briefly, and I would refer you to the Wikipedia article "Voice-onset time".



Very interesting. This would explain why voiced unaspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated all occur in natural languages, but voiced aspirated doesn't. *If* it doesn't – which I don't know.

The strange thing then is that I am able to pronounce a sound that I hear as the voiced counterpart of the aspirated /k/, /p/ or /t/. The voiced counterpart of the aspirated /t/ is especially interesting, because English has it! The English d is often pronounced in a way that to my ear is the exact voiced version of the English aspirated t. I am aware that it's possible that I am mistaken about this and a different mechanism is actually at work.
There's another thing that doesn't feel quite right in that Wikipedia description. It says that the difference between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless plosives depends on the onset time of the voicing (vibration of vocal cords). But I can produce that difference with NO voicing at all: that difference is perfectly hearable even if you whisper with no intervention of the vocal cords.


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## Cenzontle

"...but voiced aspirated doesn't"
I'm afraid it does, and that's a further complication.
I don't claim to know anything about Hindi or Sanskrit, but I assume that the "h" in names like 
Gan*dh*i, *Bh*utto, *Bh*utan, *Bh*opal, Maha*bh*arata, Bud*dh*a, *gh*ee...
indicates aspiration.  I don't know what's happening with the vocal cords between the voiced stop and the vowel.


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## frugnaglio

Right. Which makes me think that description is just wrong...
Do you agree with me about the difference between the aspirated t in “top” and the unaspirated t in “stop” when you are whispering?


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## Cenzontle

I agree that the t's of "stop" and "top" can be distinguished in a whisper.
It may be that the delay of voicing is not *equivalent to* aspiration, but rather that the delay is one of several *effects *of aspiration.


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## Delvo

frugnaglio said:


> Very interesting. This would explain why voiced unaspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated all occur in natural languages, but voiced aspirated doesn't. *If* it doesn't – which I don't know.





Cenzontle said:


> I'm afraid it does, and that's a further complication.
> I don't claim to know anything about Hindi or Sanskrit, but I assume that the "h" in names like
> Gan*dh*i, *Bh*utto, *Bh*utan, *Bh*opal, Maha*bh*arata, Bud*dh*a, *gh*ee...
> indicates aspiration.  I don't know what's happening with the vocal cords between the voiced stop and the vowel.


Yes, those are aspirated plosives. We could make this clearer by superscribing the "h", but when the transliteration scheme was first standardized, that was not called for, and distinguishing aspirated plosives from unaspirated ones followed immediately by a fully separate "h" is apparently not necessary. In the native alphabets, "bʰ", "dʰ", "ɖʰ", "gʰ", "pʰ", "tʰ", "ʈʰ", and "kʰ" have one unique letter apiece, without using the letter for "h", separate from the letters for "b", "d", "ɖ","g", "p", "t", "ʈ", and "k". Even certain affricates are treated as plosives and distinguished on the basis of aspiration, with four separate letters for "j", "jʰ", "č", and "čʰ". In transliteration of some other languages, "h" after a plosive might make a digraph for the nearest fricative, but not in the Aryan languages, which have lots of plosives and are rather short on fricatives. When users of certain Indian alphabets want to indicate a foreign fricative such as "f", they add a dot below the letter for a nearby plosive such as "p".

However, it is true that voiced aspirated plosives are uncommon, seem to appear only as the fourth type of plosive in languages that have all three other basic plosive types, and are what I'd call "unstable", meaning languages don't keep them for long (they don't have them or tend to evolve away from them soon after acquiring them). I suppose that this is based on how difficult or easy certain sounds are to produce clearly and hear distinctly. Another example of instability is any voiced sound with a place of articulation farther back/down than velar; they tend to shift upward & forward, become voiceless, or both, in various unrelated languages, so, at any given time, most languages don't have them (or have less of them than their voiceless counterparts). Another example is bilabial fricatives; bilabial plosives (b,p) and labiodental fricatives (f,v) have frequently evolved into each other in various unrelated languages, but typically with little or no sign of an intermediate stage as bilabial fricatives, so either such a stage gets entirely skipped, or it goes by so fast that it's practically undetectable historically (people quit making these sounds almost as soon as they started to).

Proto-Indo-Iranian had voiced aspirated plosives, but aspirated plosives got converted to fricatives on the Iranian side of the family, and not even all of the Aryan ones retain them; Punjabi, for example, still has voiceless aspirated plosives, but the aspiration on the voiced counterparts became a devoicing of the plosive linked with a falling tone on the subsequent vowel, so now it has only one class of voiced plosives (unaspirated) and three classes of voiceless plosives (plain, aspirated, and tone-sinking). Proto-Indo-European is normally reconstructed with voiced aspirated plosives but no voiceless aspirated plosives, but that reconstruction has been criticized as unrealistic because no known language has that kind of structure and none of the descendant languages retain it; they all have either no aspirated plosives, or only voiceless ones, or both voiced and voiceless ones. So again, even if it ever was that way, nobody kept it that way.



frugnaglio said:


> There's another thing that doesn't feel quite right in that Wikipedia description. It says that the difference between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless plosives depends on the onset time of the voicing (vibration of vocal cords). But I can produce that difference with NO voicing at all: that difference is perfectly hearable even if you whisper with no intervention of the vocal cords.


VOT is not supposed to be the only determining factor; it's just one of at least two, where the other one is forcing out a brief bit of extra air after the plosive.


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## Penyafort

Nino83 said:


> It's not true for Southern Italy (I don't know about Pyrenees). In Sicilian (but also in Neapolitan and other Southern Italian languages) there is phonological opposition between /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/, with many minimal pairs.
> But it's true that in these languages there were less intervocalic vocalization of unvoiced stops from Vulgar Latin but there are minimal pairs.



I was mainly referring to the fact that, on both sides of the central Pyrenees, Aragonese and Gascon have traditionally maintained many of the intervocalic unvoiced stops, thus being an exception to one of the main traits that would define the West/East split in the Romance languages. Regarding Neapolitan and Sicilian, I clearly remember having read about one exception to the traits of that major split, but in all honesty I haven't been able to find the source for it again, so I'll only stick to the Pyrenean phenomenon then. Which might indeed have its base on both a Basco/Iberian substrate and the remoteness of the place.


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## berndf

Delvo said:


> VOT is not supposed to be the only determining factor; it's just one of at least two, where the other one is forcing out a brief bit of extra air after the plosive.


If you are only talking about whispering you might be right, I don't know, but as far as its contribution to voiced-unvoiced-separation in Germanic plosives is concerned, this seems to be a myth. VOT seems to be the only determining factor.

If is difficult, if not impossible, to produce a long VOT without creating this "puff of air", so we can't properly separate these factors in normal speech situation. I have heard of experiments where this sound had been replaced by silence electronically to see, if it influences the phoneme recognition and it apparently didn't. If you like we can repeat this experiment here.

If there is an additional factor than it is energy. Plosives of the unvoiced series are normally pronounced more forcefully than those of the voiced series.


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## fdb

Cenzontle said:


> "...but voiced aspirated doesn't"
> I'm afraid it does, and that's a further complication.
> I don't claim to know anything about Hindi or Sanskrit, but I assume that the "h" in names like
> Gan*dh*i, *Bh*utto, *Bh*utan, *Bh*opal, Maha*bh*arata, Bud*dh*a, *gh*ee...
> indicates aspiration.  I don't know what's happening with the vocal cords between the voiced stop and the vowel.



The vocal cords continue to resonate. In other words, in "bh" both the b and the h are voiced.


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## fdb

Delvo said:


> Proto-Indo-Iranian had voiced aspirated plosives, but aspirated plosives got converted to fricatives on the Iranian side of the family,



This is true of the voiceless aspirates only. The voiced aspirates merge with the voiced unaspirates already in proto-Iranian. For example, Sanskrit has dā- for “to give” and dhā- for “to put”, but in Avestan dā- has both meanings.


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