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According to Paul Kiparsky, [2] Lachmann's law is an example of a sound law that affects deep phonological structure, not the surface result of phonological rules. In Proto-Indo-European, a voiced stop was already pronounced as voiceless before voiceless stops, as the assimilation by voicedness must have been operational in PIE (*h₂eǵtos → *h₂eḱtos 'forced, made').
In alphabets using the Latin script, an IPA-like apostrophe for ejective consonants is common. However, there are other conventions. In Hausa, the hooked letter ƙ is used for /kʼ/. In Zulu and Xhosa, whose ejection is variable between speakers, plain consonant letters are used: p t k ts tsh kr for /pʼ tʼ kʼ tsʼ tʃʼ kxʼ/.
A stop consonant that is made with the body of the tongue in contact with the hard palate is called a palatal stop. Retroflex stops are less common than velar stops or alveolar stops and do not occur in English. They sound somewhat like the English alveolar stops [t] and [d], but they have a more hollow quality.
There are several problems with the traditional reconstruction. Firstly, the rarity of *b is odd from a typological point of view. If a single voiced stop is missing from a phoneme inventory (a 'gap'), it would normally be /ɡ/ that is missing (examples including Dutch, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, and Vietnamese); on the other hand, if a labial stop is missing, the voiceless /p/ is the most ...
Owere Igbo has a seven-way contrast among bilabial stops, /pʰ p ƥ bʱ b ɓ m/, and its alveolar stops are similar. The voiceless velar implosive occurs marginally in Uspantek [17] and /ʠ/ occurs in Mam, Kaqchikel, and Uspantek. [18] Lendu has been claimed to have voiceless /ƥ ƭ ƈ/, but they may actually be creaky-voiced implosives. [9]
In Geordie, these stops may be fully voiced ([b], [d], [ɡ]) in intervocalic position. [2] In Devon, stops and other obstruents may be voiced (or at least lenited) between vowels and when final after a weak vowel, so for example the /k/ and /t/ in jacket may approach the realizations [ɡ] and [d], making the word sound similar or identical to ...
It is also possible for entire consonant clusters to undergo lenition, as in Votic, where voiceless clusters become voiced, e.g. itke-"to cry" → idgön. If a language has no obstruents other than voiceless stops, other sounds are encountered, as in Finnish, where the lenited grade is represented by chronemes, approximants, taps or even trills.
An example of the unitary behavior of prenasalized stops is provided by Fijian. In this language, as in many in Melanesia and also reconstructed for Proto-Oceanic, there is a series of voiceless stops, [p, t, k], and a series of prenasalized stops, [ᵐb, ⁿd, ᵑɡ], but there are no simple voiced stops, [b, d, ɡ]. In addition, Fijian allows ...