Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

At 19:27 6.2.2003 -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
>Is it in fact?  If you could add a vowel suffix to vit/vitt or some similar
>pair, would the pronunciation of |tt| be noticeably different? Would it be
>[t:]?
Yes.  In Swedish and Norwegian written geminates are still pronounced geminate.

>Seems to me this is just a reflection of the fairly common Germanic
>spelling convention, that a short vowel must be followed by 2 consonants.
This spelling convention is a reflexion of old quantity rules that still do
hold in Swedish and Norwegian: a (primary or secondary) stressed vowel
which is followed by a geminate or consonant cluster is short, while a
stressed vowel followed by another vowel or a single consonant is
long.  The presence of a morpheme boundary within a C cluster might upset
the rule so that the vowel becomes long anyway, but with clusters not
spanning a morpheme boundary it always holds.  Another exceptional context
is when an /r/+[dental] cluster follows a vowel, since such a "cluster" may
be phonetically realized as a non-geminate retroflex consonant.  IMNSHO
these exceptions don't invalidate the rule, but merely adds complicating
sub-rules.  I also find it significant that length is bound to stressed
syllables -- this supports the prosodic interpretation of length.

> >
> > I assume interjections don't count? If they do, the verb _ha_ [hA:] "have"
> > an the interjection _ha_ [ha] "hah" is a definite minimal pair.
>
>
>To paraphrase:  interjections are the last resort of (scoundrel)
>phonemicists.....
And expletives.  The existence of [a:] beside [A:]/[Q:] in Swedish
expletives hardly validates a claim for an extra */a:/ phoneme in central
standard Swedish*

*Western Swedish dialects, including my idiolect are different: they have
twelve contrasting vowel qualities including /a(:)/ vs. /A(:)/ -- the
latter having a somewhat notorious [Q(:)] allophone.



/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)>
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