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

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> I usually claim that my 'lect has 18 vowel phonemes. That'd include nine
> long ones, eight short ones and one diphthong /au/, so ten if length doesn't
> count (I don't really see why it shouldn't).
Because there aren't really any minimal pairs between
short and long vowels, because if you have a long vowel
you have a short consonant following it and vice versa.

So _vit_ and _vitt_ imho aren't minimal pairs even though
there is both a quantity and quality difference. You can't
have [vIt] or [vi:t:] if you get my drift. It's the same
phoneme. But that's just my interpretation.

> Swedish isn't normally analyzed as having any phonemic diphthongs, and
> considering the various Vj sequences as biphonemic don't really cause any
> trouble with my 'lect, unless you're unhappy with syllabifications -VC.V-
> (eg girl's name Maja ['maj.a]).
I'd analyze that as [maj.ja] with a geminate /j/, which would
strongly suggest it's a consonant, right?

It'd be interesting to see a spectrogram of _maj_ and see how
long that last /j/ is as compared to, say, _han_.

> But I can't see what to do with [aU] in
> words like _paus_ "pause", _rauk_ "a kind odd-looking crags found on
> Gotland's shores". Analyzing as /a:v/ doesn't work since _paus_ then rhyme
> with _stavs_ "staff's", which it certainly does not. [av] is rare, but
> occurs and I can't bring myself to think it's an allophone of [aU], even if
> I can't seem to find any minimal pairs. Is there any accepted way to do away
> with it? Aside from the assertion of an old textbook I saw that my
> pronunciation does not occur?
Yes, I've seen that too. _Kaos_ is supposed to be /kA:.Os/ and
I guess by analogy _paus_ is supposed to be /pa:.8s/ or something,
which sounds just ridiculous. Swedish definitely has a diphthong /aU/
imho.

Daniel Andreasson

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