Flam:
I believe this is technically untrue! It is true that there are no unaspirated "p's" when it is not part of a consonant cluster, but the aspiration disappears when "p" is the second member of a consonant cluster.
"spam" "speak" "Sparta" "spend"
"splash" "split" "splice" "sprite"
With all due res
pect: anybody who's ever done an audio recording of someone too close to the mic knows these Ps are all very much aspirated. Put a hand or piece of pa
per in front of your mouth when saying them; we tech types call them "P-pops". Much less so with B, the voice of P, but still technically omni
present.
I'm not sure that what you call P-pops is the same as aspiration.
Aspiration is a delay in the onset of voicing. That is, the delay between the release of the consonant and the start of the vocal cords vibrating. In English, word-initial /p/ has a much greater aspiration than Word-initial /sp/. I have seen spectrograms. It's pretty clear. So whatever you're experiencing with the microphone is something else.
I aspire to differ
.
To clarify, I don't suggest they're the same thing- rather, my crude example of p-pops are
the result of aspiration that prove the existence thereof. Aural ballistics if you like. Proof provided by the power of P.
Trust me, I see
literally hundreds of spectrograms in a typical day's work, I tweak them to the tiniest detail, and as a result I know too well
what the sound of P looks like both popped and passive. Whether it's an intitial or internal P (or SP), when the speaker is too close, the force of the breath hitting the mic is beyond overpowering, even if one letter may be more so than the other. It's not that the speaker is talking any differently on that occasion, it's just that the mic has been placed in a position to overreact to the same breath that is always there.
When a speaker is properly placed, you don't get a defect called a "p-pop" but I could still cut all the Ps out of this spoken paragraph and burn them down to a 10-second CD with a nice flowery label and credits. You won't hear any voicing at all, just pure breath with a rather sharp attack. I can give you the SPs with or without the Ss, but it's not great to dance to unless we space them just so, and that costs extra
. A LOT extra...
A standard French speaker may wield a "nearly"-unaspirated P but it still all counts as aspiration, regardless of the degree thereof, if we peruse, e.g. Merriam-Webster:
audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound -not any delay in the voicing or lack thereof. Without
some aspiration, the plosive would in fact disappear, since aspiration is all they're made of, and which I think is why they
are called plosives. (try to say "disappear" without aspiration and you get, at best, "disabbear")
One cannot say "peanut butter" without blowing out ("aspirating") as the first event of each word (it would come out "eanut utter") ...unless you deliberately inhale while doing so, technically possible but unnatural and impractical (and even then it's just reverse-aspiration).
Plus, you could hyperventilate, or put an eye out, for which we would all probably be poorer.