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

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.

Now, Finnish OTOH, that's another matter...

I'm not quite sure what you're after, Roger, but I hope at least
I'm answering *something*. :)

Daniel Andreasson

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