> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. Yes, that makes sense -- I certainly lea

> 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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation