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

while clusters have developed into geminate stops. Thus the preaspirating
speakers of Goajiro seem to contrast intervocalic preaspirated
stops with intervocalic geminate stops, much as do speakers of Icelandic.
In Maddieson’s (1984) description of Goajiro, no such stop contrast is
reported. It is possible that a normative stop contrast once existed, but
that it was already disappearing at the time of Holmer’s observations and
later died out completely. Whether this contrast is upheld by some other
means (for example through duration) by non-preaspirating speakers is
unclear.
Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:73) analysed a recording of a Goajiro
speaker who did not preaspirate consistently but “sometimes used a
breathy voice offset to a vowel that was followed by a long stop.” Since
there are no durational measurements of the stops and they are not
“tagged” for historical origin, it is impossible to tell whether or not the
contrast described by Holmer is upheld.
According to Holmer, a peculiarity in Goajiro preaspiration is that
word-initial stops can be preaspirated if the preceding word or prefix
ends in a vowel. Thus a word like pana, 1 ‘leaf,’ will be produced as
pana utterance-initially, without aspiration, but postvocalically the
[p] is preaspirated, as in unuupana ‘tree leaf’ and nupana ‘its
leaf; leaves.’ As Hansson points out (1997:32), this pattern is reminiscent
of Fitzgerald’s account of O’odham.
Material suggesting that preaspiration is found in Forest Nenets dates
as far back as the middle of the 19 th century (Hansson 1997:24). Hansson
interprets his sources (Lehtisalo 1947, 1956, 1960; Posti 1954; Marosán
1983) as indicating that a long stop in the Tundra Nenets dialect corresponds
to a preaspirated stop in the Forest Nenets dialect. Given that
Hansson’s sources are competent in Finnish, and are thus familiar with a
language in which /h/ can occur in any preconsonantal position, it may
be assumed that Forest Nenets allows aspirative sounds only before stops
and not before other consonants. Otherwise, these authors would have
analysed the pre-occlusive aspiration as /h/, like they would in Finnish.
1
The double brackets indicate that these transcriptions are taken from Holmer’s work
(cf. Chapter 3.1).
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