Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

On a quite different note, Liberman (e.g., 1982) has proposed that
preaspiration is essentially an accentual phenomenon, the origins of
which may go as far back as to Proto-Germanic. He describes preaspiration
as a “phonologically relevant breathed reinforcement” (1982:98).
A breathed reinforcement, in turn, is a prosodic unit that can occur in
most (or all?) postvocalic contexts, and Liberman suggests that the ON
lenis and fortis geminates alike were produced with such breathed reinforcements.
In Liberman’s account, breathed reinforcements came to be
interpreted as preaspirations (i.e., segmental rather than prosodic units)
after the voiced lenes became voiceless. This is at least the way I interpret
the following passage:
The Icelandic weakening of plosives resulted in the phonematic
coalescence of such words as labba and lappa. After the merger of
postvocalic /pp/ and /bb/ preaspiration became fixed before one type
of consonant only. In Icelandic it was retained before original /pp tt
kk/ and began to signal the position at which formerly phonologically
voiceless stops had occurred. The absence of preaspiration came to
signal the position of former voiced plosive phonemes.
(Liberman 1982:268)
A thorough critique of Liberman’s approach is provided in Hansson
(1997:104ff). Here, suffice it to say that Liberman offers little in terms of
detailed phonetic analysis or explanation of “breathed reinforcements.”
Also, to explain why there are Nordic dialects that have voiced lenes and
still have preaspirated stops, a different scenario than that proposed by
Liberman would be required.
A number of other authors have made contributions to the issue of
ON stop production. 1 A common thread in most of their writings is the
emphasis on explaining why the ON geminate fortes, pp, tt, kk, are preaspirated.
As we have seen, there are dialects in which the singleton
fortes are also preaspirated. Explanations that only account for preaspiration
in geminates can only provide a partial account of the problem.
Kortland’s (1988) radically different approach to the issue of ON
stop production has the potential of accounting for preaspiration in
1 A thorough review is found in Hansson (1997), who discusses, for example, the
writings of Kacnel’son (e.g., 1966), Steblin-Kamenskij (e.g. 1957), Salmons (1992),
Wagner (1964) and Kylstra (e.g., 1972).
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