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

The case of preaspiration can be described in the same E/C manner.
In CSw today, the scope of phonetic variation with regard to preaspiration
is roughly equivalent with stage t3 or t4 in the vowel change example.
Note that this does not imply that there is a change in progress.
The fact that stage t4 in our hypothetical vowel change is transitory applies
to that change and not necessarily to others. As previously indicated,
I believe that the relative freedom in the production of voice offset
relative to oral closure has been a stable feature of most dialects in Scandinavia
for more than a thousand years. In some areas the structure of
phonetic variation for these stops has changed. The relative freedom in
the timing of voice offset has been restricted to encompass only preaspirated
variants or unaspirated variants. In cases in which preaspiration has
become normative, the change has been described as one by which, for
example, /tt/ becomes /ht/. Again, however, that does not entail that any
single speaker at any time has been required to perform a phonological
reinterpretation of the stops. A parallel case can be made for postaspiration.
Let us now consider voicelessness in nasals before fortis stops. The
tendency for anticipatory voice offset in nasals in CSw is much weaker
than the preaspiration tendency. However, analogous to the hypocorrective
process through which it was suggested that preaspiration
became part of the pronunciation norm, it is possible that the relative
freedom in the coordination of glottal and supraglottal gestures extended
to nasal + fortis stop junctures. As discussed in Chapter 3, an ON sequence
of nasal + fortis stop is, in most normatively preaspirating
dialects, reflected as a sequence of voiceless (or partially voiceless) nasal
followed by a voiceless stop. This indicates that such sequences may
have had nasals with non-normative voicelessness in PN, which paralleled
non-normative preaspiration. The production of half-voiced, halfvoiceless
nasals in the Gräsö dialect demonstrates that normative voicelessness
need not involve a completely voiceless nasal. By analogy, it is
possible that non-normative voicelessness in nasals involved only partially
voiceless nasals in PN.
The E/C change scenario exemplified in Figure 5–1 may work
equally well for voicelessness in nasals and postaspiration. Like preaspi-
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