The stop inventory of Witzapan Nawat, a critically endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, has been traditionally described as consisting only of a voiceless series /p t k kw/. In this paper, I measure the voice onset time, consonant duration, and percent voicing in stops produced by five L1 Witzapan Nawat speakers. I find that, while /p t kw/ have acoustic characteristics of voiceless stops in practically all contexts, the velar stop in this language is better analyzed as a voiced velar stop /ɡ/ rather than /k/. This results in an asymmetrical and unusual stop system that is not predicted by some theories of phonemic inventory structure. For instance, markedness-based theories propose that /ɡ/ is more marked that /b d/ and predict that, if a language has one voiced stop, it would be /b/ or /d/ rather than /ɡ/. On the other hand, feature-systemic models predict that, if a language has a stop with the [+voice] feature at a given place of articulation, it will also tend to have this feature in stops at other points of articulation to maximize feature economy. The phonemic inventory of Witzapan Nawat contradicts these predictions. I explain the asymmetrical stop inventory of this language as the result of diachronic developments involving sound change and analogy, concluding that language change does not necessarily advance towards symmetry and that phonemic inventories are the reflection of their diachrony, as proposed by Evolutionary Phonology.

中文翻译：

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Witzapan Nawat 的不对称止损库存

Witzapan Nawat 是一种极度濒危的萨尔瓦多土著语言，传统上被描述为仅由清音系列 /ptkk 组成w/。在本文中，我测量了五个 L1 Witzapan Nawat 扬声器产生的发声时间、辅音持续时间和停音百分比。我发现，而 /ptkw/ 在几乎所有上下文中都具有清音塞音的声学特征，因此该语言中的软腭塞音最好被分析为浊软腭塞音 /ɡ/ 而不是 /k/。这导致了一些音素库存结构理论没有预测到的不对称和不寻常的停止系统。例如，基于标记的理论提出 /ɡ/ 比 /bd/ 更标记，并预测，如果一种语言有一个浊音塞音，它将是 /b/ 或 /d/ 而不是 /ɡ/。另一方面，特征系统模型预测，如果一种语言在给定的发音位置处具有 [+voice] 特征的停顿，那么它也倾向于在其他发音点处具有此特征以最大化特征经济。Witzapan Nawat 的音素目录与这些预测相矛盾。我将这种语言的不对称停止库存解释为涉及声音变化和类比的历时发展的结果，得出的结论是，语言变化不一定会朝着对称性发展，而音素库存是其历时性的反映，正如进化音系学所提出的那样。