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

turn into ChV sequences in which V is lost. The distributional character
of h-sounds may turn out to be quite different in such cases, since the
h-sound will occur not only after voiceless stops. How will this affect the
phonologist’s interpretation of h-sounds?
Insights into this question may be obtained from, for example,
Bowden and Hajek’s (1999) analysis of Taba, an Austronesian language
spoken in Indonesia. In Taba, an aspiration that follows a stop is most
appropriately viewed as an independent segment and not as a property of
the stop. This is unusual, and its reasoning may be that the h-sound in
Taba can occur in various postconsonantal positions, due largely to the
prefixing of verbs with simple consonants. Apparently, these prefixes
originally had a CV structure, but the vowel has been lost. Thus in Taba
we find words such as [mhonas] ‘sick,’ [nhik] ‘bat,’ [khan] ‘I go’ and
even [hhan] ‘you (pl.) go’ (Bowden and Hajek’s transcriptions). Given
this distribution for h-sounds, a phonological interpretation by which a
sequence of a stop and an h-sound build a cluster of two separate phonological
units is viable and appropriate.
We now come to the question of whether preaspiration is reversed
postaspiration. Thráinsson (1978) argues that since preaspiration in Icelandic
has normal segment length (i.e., is not that different from, for example,
[s] or [n] in its typical duration), it is “not simply the inverse of
postaspiration.” For this reason, Thráinsson suggests that preaspiration in
Icelandic should be given “segment status.” Consequently, Thráinsson
opposes the view that preaspiration is a “component” or a “phonetic
feature” of the stop that follows. However, the question itself is imprecise.
Are we asking whether preaspiration is an exact phonetic mirror
image of postaspiration? Or whether preaspiration and postaspiration are
phonological correspondences? Or both?
Let us consider the phonological aspects. As to whether preaspirations
are components or features of the following stop, this is only relevant
if we have a strictly segmental view of phonology. In a less segmental
view, the question of whether or not preaspiration “belongs to”
the stop is less of an issue. Preaspirations are used as one of the phonetic
correlates that signal the difference between two kinds of vowel + stop
sequences. As for phonotactics, it has been argued that preaspiration and
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