Linguistics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
There is [d̚] in the official IPA chart, and it's very confusing for me. My native language is Korean, whose unreleased stops are either voiceless or nasal.
If a voiced stop is unreleased, that would make a closed oral cavity with vibrating vocal cord. That's exactly same as de-nasalized nasal. So [d̚] equals [n͊]. is this true?
Phonetically, stop sounds ([t d n] etc) are distinguished by a complete closure of the vocal tract. Nasal sounds ([n]) allow air to escape through the nose; oral/non-nasal sounds ([t d]) do not.
The nasal/oral distinction is pretty easy to measure phonetically, so phoneticians are happy about that. But the voiced/voiceless distinction is a bit less obvious. The most popular measurement I've seen used is the voice onset time (VOT)—in other words, how much time is there between when the closure opens, and when the vocal cords start vibrating?
So what does it mean for any of these to be unreleased? That means the closure doesn't open at all. So there's no way to have an "unreleased aspirated" stop. But you can have voicing happen during the closure, or not: this creates the distinction between unreleased voiced and unreleased tenuis stops. An unreleased voiced stop is indeed exactly the same as an unreleased "denasalized nasal"—the only difference between phonetic [d] and [n] is whether the nasal passage is open or not.
