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

Daniel Andreasson wrote:
>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:]? 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.
>
>Well, in Swedish, this is because if the vowel is short, then the
>consonant is long and vice versa. Examples:
>
>vit /vi:t/
>vitt /vIt:/
>
>If you add a vowel, the length of the consonant stays the same.
>
>vita /vi:ta/
>vitta /vIt:a/ (not that _vitta_ means anything.)
>
>So consonant length is just as phonemic as vowel length in
>Swedish, that is, not at all. You have long and short vowels
>and consonants, but if you have one you can't have the other.
If you consider neither vocalic length nor consonantal length to be
phonemic, what do you consider to be the phonemic difference 'tween pairs
like _vit_ and _vitt_?

                                                       Andreas

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