The PAN Voiced Stops and Affricates

Overview & Synopsis

This paper examines the fate in Formosan languages of the Proto-Austronesian voiced stop and affricate phonemes. It argues that two sets with different airstream mechanisms should be distinguished: an implosive set consisting of *b and *Z (in Ross’s notation), little subject to devoicing, and a plain-voiced set, prone to devoicing, comprised of the more retracted stops *D [ɖ] and *g [g], and two affricates *d [ʤ] and *z [dz]. Outside of lenitions, the plainvoiced set remains voiced only in the southern Formosan languages Paiwan, Puyuma, and Rukai. This general pattern is obscured in the modern languages by the widespread mergers affecting the coronals. In the present analysis, the Proto-Austronesian alveolar stop—implosive [ɗ]—is thought to be the phoneme symbolized *Z by Ross, not his *d, which I take to have been [ʤ]. This paper also argues that *D [ɖ], *d [ʤ], and *z [dz] became implosive in Bunun through merger with *Z; and that the more retracted articulation of /d/ compared with /t/ in Pazeh and Bunun comes from being ‘zombie implosives’, that is, plain-voiced sounds having evolved out of an implosive.