Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. In the former case unvoiced consonants often have aspirated allophones as in English, and in the latter case unaspirated consonants often have voiced allophones especially between vowels, as in Chinese or Korean. Hence why it makes sense to map the two in this manner - if your native language uses aspiration as the primary feature, and you hear someone who uses voicing, your brain will generally map it "automatically" for you, and their speech will sound weird but understandable.
(But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.)
>> True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ] that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare.
> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.
My understanding is that all of these options are fairly common:
- two-way contrast between aspirated and unaspirated
- two-way contrast between voiced and voiceless
- three-way contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless, and voiced
- three-way contrast for labial and alveolar stops; two-way contrast for velar stops
> They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way.
True, but most languages don't distinguish between [h] and [ɦ] to begin with, with one often the allophone of the other. So listening to Hindi it sounds like the same thing, more or less.
> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.
Yes, that makes sense -- I certainly learned something from this conversation. It makes sense that speakers would naturally tend to classify things along different lines, and in Chinese the aspirated / unaspirated classification makes sense.
That said, after having had some time to sit with the proposition that 'j' in the English name "Joe" is voiced, and the "zh" in Chinese word "zhou" is unvoiced, it continues to seem obviously false to me. It seems very much to me like mistaking of the map for the territory [1].
When you're listening to it, you are hearing the phone. That may well be voiced, even if the underlying phoneme is unvoiced.
To determine the true nature of the phoneme in a given language, you need to "flip the bit" on voicing (importantly: without adding/removing aspiration!) and see whether native speakers will treat it as different or not.
(But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.)