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The bilabial plosives /p/ and /b/

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In Afrikaans /p/ is a voicelessbilabialplosive; its voiced counterpart is /b/ (Van Wyk 1977; Le Roux and Pienaar 1927; Kent 1992; MacKay 1987). Afrikaans /p/ counts among the most frequent phonemes of Afrikaans; /b/ has a more restricted distribution, inter alia due to the phonological process of final devoicing.

The bilabialplosives do not exhibit any meaningful variation in terms of place of articulation.

Table 1

Consonant	Place	Manner	Feature specification
/p/	bilabial	plosive	-sonorant, -voice, +labial, -coronal, -velar, - continuant
/b/	bilabial	plosive	-sonorant, +voice, +labial, -coronal, -velar, - continuant

Phonotactic behaviour of /p/
Phonotactic behaviour of /b/
Variation of /b/ with /v/
Acoustic information

[+]Phonotactic behaviour of /p/

The phoneme /p/ can occur as singleton consonant in onset position (1a), or in clusters of two or three consonants, such as in (1b) – (1c).

Onset

paar

pair

praat

to speak

;

plaat

plate

spreek

to speak

;

plas

to splash

The /p/ combines regularly with the alveolar, non-nasal sonorants, /r/ and /l/ (as in (b) and (c)). In some loan words /p/ occurs as first consonant in the clusters pnpneumaties pneumatic, or pspsige psyche. In these cases the first consonant, as in English, is deleted.

Furthermore, it can function as sole consonant in coda position (2a), as well as in double clusters, as in (2b).

Coda

hap

to bite

;

lamp

;

skerp

sharp

;

help

to help

In complex codas, /p/ is commonly preceded by sonorant consonants, viz. the homorganic bilabial nasal /m/ and by the liquids /l/ and /r/ (2b).

Finally, /p/ regularly appears intervocalically – as in (3) – preceded by all kinds of vowel segments.

Intervocalically

appel

apple

;

druppel

drop

;

sypel

to seep

[+]Phonotactic behaviour of /b/

The occurrence of voiced plosive /b/ is more restricted phonotactically than that of its voiceless counterpart /p/. In onset position it functions only as singleton consonant (4a), or, in combination with a second, alveolar non-nasal sonorant consonant (4b). Thus a complex onset /bCC-/ is not allowed:

Onset

baar

to bear

bruin

brown

;

blaar

leaf

Because of final devoicing, [b] does not occur syllable-finally, including word-finally. Consequently, /b/ turns into [p] in rare words such as rib id. and skub scale, as well as in proper names like Namib.

Afrikaans /b/ regularly appears intervocalically, as in (5) – preceded by all kinds of vowel segments.

Intervocalically

kabel

cable

;

dubbel

double

;

bybel

bible

Except for cases of final devoicing in which /b/ becomes [p], these two plosives alternate in the case of voicing assimilation, where /p/ becomes [b], as in op+deel [ɔbdel] subdivide, or op+werk /ɔbvɛrk/ work up.

[+]Variation of /b/ with /v/

Le Roux and Pienaar (1927) mentioned a number of cases where /b/ is replaced by /v/ in unstressed syllables, such as troebel > troewel. cloudy. This frequently happens in proper names, like Kobus > Kowus. The output of the voicing assimilation of /p/ into [b] can thus in turn trigger a change into [v].

[+]Acoustic information

Table 2: Example

Sound	Sound waves and spectrogram
	Figure 1 [click image to enlarge]

Figure 1 portrays sound wave forms (upper window) and spectrograms (lower window) of the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/ (in the nonsense word papapap) and the voiced bilabial plosive /b/ (in the nonsense word bababab).

The sounds are labelled using phonetic transcription; thus [p]. Note that the vowels written as a are all short [ɑ].
The final /b/ of bababab is devoiced to phonetically voiceless [p], due to the phonological process of final devoicing.
The voiceless plosives of [pɑ'pɑpɑp] are indicated with green rectangles; while the voiced plosives of [bɑ'bɑbɑp] are indicated with blue rectangles, except the final devoiced /b/ > [p], which is marked with purple.
The release bursts of the onset plosive portion of both consonants, [p] and [b], are not clearly visible in these examples.
The intervocalic silence gaps of voiceless [p] in papapap are visible as green rectangles (cf. 3); no positive voice onset time (VOT) is present between the release burst and the start of the vowel, indicative of an absence of aspiration in Afrikaans [p].
Negative voice onset time (-VOT) is clearly visible in the form of the harmonic waveforms of [b] in Window A, and black bars at the bottom of Window B, i.e. quasi-periodic modulation of the noise by glottal pulses in the case of voiced consonants.
If plosives are released in word-final position, a plosive burst is visible (marked in dark blue).

extra

Voicing feature in [b]

In the case of the voiced stop [b], a negative VOT is in most cases present in Afrikaans. This feature is variable across speakers: some speakers always realise [b] (and other voicedplosives) as pre-voiced, while others do so only half the time, or even not at all (Coetzee, Patrice and Wissing 2014).

References

Coetzee, A. W., Patrice S. Beddor and Daan P. Wissing2014Emergent tonogenesis in AfrikaansThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America1352421
Kent, Ray D. and Charles Read1992The acoustics analysis of speechSingular Publishing Group
Le Roux, T.H. & Pienaar, P. de V1927Afrikaanse fonetiek.Juta
MacKay, Ian R.I1987Phonetics: the science of speech productionCollege-Hill
Van Wyk, E.B1977Praktiese fonetiek vir taalstudente: 'n inleiding.Butterworth

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About this article

Author(s): Daan Wissing

Category: Afrikaans Phonology

Keywords: segmentconsonantphonotacticsfinal devoicingvoicing assimilationphoneticsconsonantbilabialplosives

Version: 1.0, May 2020

Version history:

version	editor(s)	date	remarks
1.0	Daan Wissing	May 2020

This is a beta version.

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