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

Two out of the four subjects (EI and MS) behave entirely according
to the Area 2 pattern. Thus they do not preaspirate stops in VC syllables,
irrespective of vowel height, for example: [b] báti ‘boat (dat.),’
[m] mat ‘food (acc.),’ [e] eta ‘to eat’ and [ip] skip ‘ship.’ 1 One of
the subjects (SG), behaves according to the Area 1 pattern, and so
ON p, t, k are never reflected as preaspirated when they follow close
vowels, but do tend to be preaspirated following other vowels. Thus, he
says [bhn] bátin ‘the boat’ and [eha] eta ‘eat,’ but [vk] vík ‘bay’
and [lil] lykil ‘key.’ Lastly, one subject (BJ) behaves, in most respects,
according to the Area 1 pattern. In her speech, though, [e] tends to block
preaspiration, at least in the word [e] eta ‘to eat,’ which she produces 7
times and which never has a preaspirated stop. 2
For those speakers who have the Area 1 distribution of preaspiration
(like SG), there is a phonological contrast between two stop series in VC
syllables. This is apparent when one compares “native” words with loan
words. An intervocalic stop in a word that derives from ON, e.g. eta ‘eat’
and gøta ‘street,’ is preaspirated. By contrast, a loan word may have an
intervocalic stop that is voiceless unaspirated, e.g. sleta ‘sleigh’ and
radar ‘radar.’
One may infer from this distinction that preaspiration in VC syllables
is not an entirely new phenomenon in Faroese. A word like sleta,
for example, which does not have a preaspirated stop, must have come
into Faroese at a time when preaspiration in VC syllables was already
normative. Otherwise, the stop in sleta would be preaspirated. Speakers
who do not preaspirate in VC syllables (i.e., have the Area 2 distribution)
make no such distinction, and therefore there is only one stop series
1 Since the data reported in this section reflect actual pronunciations in spontaneous
speech data, they contain considerable variation in phonetic detail. Particularly, one
should keep in mind that the individual words presented here are often taken out of
their phonetic context. For example, the example [b] has a voiced bilabial stop in
its onset since it was preceded by a voiced segment. Likewise, the difference in postaspiration
between [m] and [ip] has to do with the fact that [m] is followed by
a word beginning with a vowel, whereas [ip] is in utterance-final position.
2 Out of curiosity, I analysed some read speech material produced by BJ, and found that
the stop in the word part -net- (found in various forms of the word internet) was
usually preaspirated. Therefore one can not say that [e] generally blocks preaspiration
in her speech.
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