/s/+aspirated stop
Does anyone out there know if there are any languages that have word- or syllable-initial /s/-clusters where the /s/ is followed by an aspirated voiceless stop (e.g. [sph-])?
November 17, 2005
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In Sanskrit, for one, aspiration is contrastive on s_V obstruents (only voiceless ones occur in that context) both word-initially and elsewhere. For example, there is a minimal pair in the simple present tense conjugation of “to be”:
stah “they (dual) are”
sthah “you (dual) are”
You also find #sphV (vs. #spV), etc. skhV- is marginal, however, commonly occurring in only one root, skhal- (”stumble, totter” [post-Vedic only]).
Here are some fun token frequencies of the relevant word-initial sequences from an Epic Sanskrit corpus (many of the actual examples in this corpus are obscured by sandhi, but these results, which count only #sCV sequences after orthographic spaces, should still be roughly indicative of the token frequencies in the language):
spV 620 : #sphV 190
stV 754 : #sthV 3218
skV 240 : #skhV 14
Most examples of #sth- are from the root sthA- “stand” (cognate with the English).
Comment by Kevin Ryan — November 17, 2005 @ 4:41 pm
Living or dead?
In ancient Greek, there are numerous words with #σφ- /#spʰ-/: link
fewer with #σθ- /#stʰ-/: link
lots again in #σχ- /#skʰ-/: link
Likewise in Sanskrit (#sth- seems more common than #sph- or #skh-). You can do a substring search of the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionary <webapps.uni-koeln.de/tamil/>.
Comment by Angelo — November 17, 2005 @ 4:42 pm
How about in English? ’s possible.
Comment by ACW — November 18, 2005 @ 2:58 pm
Really, ACW? [p] is nowhere near as aspirated in ’s possible as it is in possible … for me, anyway.
Comment by Eric Bakovic — November 18, 2005 @ 4:54 pm
Hmm … I’m willing to bet that Lisa’s post was motivated by watching this.
Comment by Eric Bakovic — November 18, 2005 @ 7:06 pm
Ahhh, Eric, you think too highly of me. Truth be told, I haven’t been keeping up since the summer.
It just came up in a class, and I didn’t know the answer, so I thought I’d put it out there…
Comment by Lisa Davidson — November 18, 2005 @ 9:25 pm
Damn. I keep losing bets on this blog!
Comment by Eric Bakovic — November 18, 2005 @ 10:24 pm
Eric–what were you smoking to even be able to find the ‘this’ you referenced?
Comment by Geoffrey S. Nathan — November 23, 2005 @ 3:10 pm
I’ve been hooked on homestarrunner.com cartoons for ages now. No smoking required.
Comment by Eric Bakovic — November 23, 2005 @ 6:44 pm
Eastern Armenian has word-initial s followed by aspirated stops, as in the word sp’jurrk’ “diaspora”, where the apostrophe represents aspiration and the rr = a trilled r.
Comment by Bert Vaux — December 23, 2005 @ 12:09 am