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

consonants that tended to occur on vowel–stop boundaries in CSw. 1
Rositzke (1940) investigated these phenomena further, also with the aid
of a kymograph. He found that his three male subjects had a tendency to
produce fricatives (and sometimes affricates) on the boundary of a long,
close vowel and a stop (both fortes, /p t k/, and lenes, /b d g/). His
examples 2 include kt, kt and kpt for kut ‘seal pup,’
d, t and d for gud ‘god,’ and biçt, biht and bit
for bit ‘a bit, a bite.’ Rositzke did not observe this tendency for friction
after any other vowels.
Rositzke also observed that his subjects tended to produce an aspiration
before fortis stops, irrespective of which vowel preceded them.
Rositzke gives several examples in which a non-close, long vowel (e.g.,
/e/, //, /ø/ and //) is followed by a preaspirated fortis stop, for instance
pehk peka ‘point’ and khpt kapet ‘the capture.’ If the stop
is lenis, the vowel is simply followed by the stop silence, with no intervening
aspiration. According to Rositzke’s measurements, the duration
of these preaspirations varied between 20–50 ms. 3 After short vowels,
Rositzke simply comments that “post-vocalic aspirations […] occur sporadically
before tenues [i.e., /p t k/]” and although he does not state it
explicitly, one can infer from his text that he never observed a corresponding
preaspiration before a lenis stop.
While Rositzke wished to attribute both the post-vocalic friction and
the pre-occlusive aspiration to the same cause, it seems that two different
factors contribute to the observed friction/aspiration phenomenon. On the
1 The claim found in some sources (e.g. Rositzke, 1940) that Lundell described
preaspiration in the Standard variety of Swedish as early as 1879 is unfounded.
However, Noreen (1903:400) gives a fairly detailed description of what he calls
“dependent or ‘parasitic’ sound” that can occur on the boundary of a vowel and a
subsequent stop:
[…] for example, the i-sound in klipp, before it is completely cut off, first
changes […] into a very short y-sound and then, as voicing diminishes with
the widening of the glottis, it changes into an equally short h-sound with a ytimbre,
i.e. approximately kliyhp.
(Noreen 1903:400; my translation)
2 Converted here as closely as possible to the current IPA notation. The original
transcriptions do not denote vowel length and postaspiration on word-initial stops.
3 Which is very much in line with the findings for CSw in Chapter 4.
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