3 Responses to “Datapoint for feature 4A and language wals_code_spa”

1. Omar Says:
   August 23rd, 2012 at 11:25 am

   This is terribly wrong. It should be “plosives alone” Spanish has [p]/[b], [t]/[d] and [k]/[g] but completely lacks voiced versions of [s], [f], [θ] or [x]. I hope this gets corrected soon.

2. Florian Says:
   November 13th, 2013 at 8:34 am

   @Omar: Spanish does have [β] [ð] and [ɣ] though… But I agree on that Spanish has a distinction between voiced and unvoiced plosives. The justification given for it having no voicing distinction is:

   “Note that Spanish is not treated as having a voicing contrast in plosives since the sounds written with the letters b, d, g are not pronounced as plosives in most of their occurrences in speech but as voiced fricatives or approximants. Spanish therefore belongs to the final group of languages in this classification, those with a voicing contrast in fricatives but not in plosives.”

   “…most of their occurrences in speech…” – which implies that they are plosives in some environments and I’d say that voicing is distinctive there – word-initially.

3. Florian Says:
   November 19th, 2013 at 10:13 am

   …except if you analyse the phonemes as /β/ /ð/ /ɣ/ with plosive realizations in certain environments. Then, of course, Spanish doesn’t have a phonemic voice distinction in plosives (but in fricatives because of /θ/ and /x/ which contrast with /ð/ and /ɣ/

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