In this chapter I examine the phonetic origins of voiceless
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Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins
2004; 2006;
2008b; 2015). In terms of a general
hierarchy of contrast, we observe that: voiceless obstruents are
common; voiceless sonorant consonants are uncommon; voiceless vowels
are extremely rare. One phonetic source of voiceless sonorants
is coarticulation in RH and HR and clusters, where R is a sonorant
and H is a segment produced with a spread glottal gesture. Voiceless
sonorants may also arise when laryngeal spreading gestures are
associated with prosodic domains. In this second case, voiceless
sonorants can arise as allophones of their voiced counterparts.
While a fair number of languages show voiceless sonorant glides,
liquids and nasals phonologized as a consequence of RH/HR
coarticulation, voiceless vowels resist phonologization despite
their high frequency as phonetic variants of modal vowels. In
some cases, voiceless vowels are lost before phonologization can
occur. In other cases, resistance to phonologization may be due to
effects of analogy, /h/, word phonotactics, or lexical
competition.
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