Re: Hiatus within words

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000 09:10:07 -0800, LeoMoser(Acadon@Acadon.com)
<acadon@...> wrote:
>
>English may have hiatus, but maybe not all speakers.
>Given the tendency of English vowels to diphthongize,
>the common insert will be a [w] or [y] of some sort.
>Thus for many "poet' will be [po(w)et] and "leo" may
>become [li(y)o]. If -a- is the first element, the chance
>of hiatus rises, but some may put in a glottal stop.
>but his "..Cuba is..." would have it.
>
>Many artlangs are rich in vowels. Whether they
>have hiatus is often not addressed. Many artlangs
>do seem to have it. Tolkien seems to have used
>it, Ursula Le Guin as well. Some people seem
>to count languages with it as "more musical." I do
>not note it in Klingon.
>
>Best regards to all,                LEO
In English, I use glides, glottal stops, and (I think) sometimes hiatus,
but not very consistently. I think that the [w] in [powet] is part of the
/o/, and not something inserted though (I pronounce the word more like
[p<h>o-uI?], Kirschenbaum), but there may be another example somewhere.

I notice that I tend to avoid potential hiatal situations in my conlangs.
In my latest language all syllables are CV. When borrowing words, glides <w
and y> or <h (a voiced fricative)> must be inserted between vowels, and the
glottal stop is used to provide an initial consonant. In my latest Romance
conlang, glides were inserted in the ancestral dialect, which later became
/v and Z/; in other places diphthongs developed (including tonal
diphthongs), and of course elision of final vowels when followed by an
initial vowel.

Jeff