Re: Hiatus within words

On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 09:10:07AM -0800, LeoMoser(Acadon@Acadon.com) wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
Actually, I've been thinking about word-final features in my conlang...
currently, it's quite haphazard -- there can be final consonants and
initial consonants on the next word that form an illegal cluster, etc.. I
suppose I'll either need hiatus between such words, or perhaps do elisions
of some sort. Perhaps I should totally rework my conlang's phonology :-)

>
> Hiatus is common in many Pacific languages,
> where it often contrasts with the glottal stop. But
> spellings do not always tell the story. How many
> of the scores of languages listed by Mark with "dua"
> for "two"  ( http://zompist.com/numbers.shtml )
> actually pronounce it as two syllables?
The Malay pronunciation of "dua" is taught as [du.a] but in practice, it's
often [duwa] or even just [dwa].

> Indonesian "sosiologi" clearly has five syllables:
> [so.si.o.lo.gi] with hiatus between i and o.
[snip]

Hmm. AFAIK this breakdown only occurs in formal descriptions of the
language. At least in Malaysia, loanwords like this are often pronounced
so fast that adjacent vowels behave basically like diphthongs.
Conceptually, though, I think it's regarded as separate syllables.


T