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

Eastern Ojibwa sets itself apart from the other Algonquian languages
in that instead of having lenited the first elements in clusters, these have
completely disappeared and a compensatory lengthening has occurred in
the second cluster element. This yields an opposition between geminate
and non-geminate stops. In his account of Ojibwa, Bloomfield (1956)
briefly describes the nature of the phonetic distinction between geminates
and non-geminates.
The fortes are voiceless, vigorously articulated, and often rather long.
The stops, pp, tt, kk, cc, are often preceded by a slight aspiration:
eto·ppuwin ‘table’ […] The lenes are usually voiceless; between vowels
and especially after a nasal they are often partly or wholly voiced:
ekate·ntam ‘he is ashamed.’ The lenes are quite vigorously articulated,
but less so than the fortes; they are decidedly short and are never aspirated.
The lenes occur initially, after vowels, and after nasals.
(Bloomfield 1956:8)
This is basically all that is known about preaspiration in Ojibwa.
Maddieson (1984) and Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) have interpreted
this as meaning that the fortis stops are preaspirated. Consequently,
Ojibwa is described as having preaspiration in the UPSID database
(Maddieson & Precoda 1989). However, from Bloomfield’s comments
one may infer that preaspiration in Ojibwa is fairly sporadic (“The
stops […] are often preceded by a slight aspiration”; my italics) rather
than a general characteristic of the language. We should also keep in
mind that lenes and fortes seem to differ in duration more consistently
than they differ in preaspiration. For these reasons, it is possible that
Ojibwa has (or at least had) non-normative preaspiration very similar to
that in CSw today (cf. Ch. 4, section 4.2.3.2), rather than the normative
kind found in Icelandic and Faroese. The issue remains undecided, however.
Holmer (1949) describes occurrences of preaspiration in Goajiro. He
finds that preaspiration is an idiolectal rather than a normative feature of
the language, used by relatively few speakers (ibid:49). Thus, according
to Holmer’s own description, we should describe preaspiration in Goajiro
as non-normative, like in CSw. However, the situation here may be more
complex. Historically, according to Holmer, these preaspirated stops
have developed from “simple” stops (i.e., not clusters or geminates)
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