Re: Second report on Koni'

Quoting Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>:

> Isaac Penzev wrote:
> > Christophe Grandsire ikrih:
> >
> >
> >>En réponse à Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>:
> >>In the South, usually /f/ is [f], /v/ is [v] and /w/ is [v\] or [w] or
> [v]
> >>depending on position. More in the North, at least according to Irina
> Rempt
> >
> > and
> >
> >>my own ears tend to agree, /f/ is [f], /w/ is [v] and /v/ is lax [f]
> (I don't
> >>know how IPA would mark that, [v_0] perhaps), so the difference
> between /f/
> >>and /v/ would be a tense-lax distinction. Do you think it would fit
> what your
> >>ears tell you? :)
> >
> >
> > It would. So it's North. I hear it the way you say. A propos, can you
> then
> > explain me this tense-lax distinction? I'm especially interested
> because it may
> > help me to describe better the Ukrainian phoneme /v/ whose main
> allophone is
> > definitely different from Russian [v] (which is the same as in French,
> I
> > believe), but surely not [w] which occurs only before consonants and
> in
> > auslaut.
>
> I thought lax/tense distinctions only applied to vowels.
A distinction between of high vs low muscular tension during the production of
consonants may be termed a fortis vs lenis distinction. In at least my variety
of Swedish, it's the primary distinction between /f/ and /v/ (in addition, /v/
is often more-or-less voiced, whereas /f/ is always unvoiced).

                                                        Andreas