Re: Hiatus within words
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 31, 2000, 1:38 |
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Leo Moser brings up a very interesting point.
>It's been brought to my attention that some
>languages, e.g., Turkish, have no "hiatus." Thus
>one Turkish vowel cannot be directly followed
>by another vowel inside a word without an
>inserted consonant or glide of some kind.>
I could be wrong, but it's my impression that most native Turkish
roots are of the form (C)VC....? so hiatus would hardly ever occur. Lots of
Arabic/Persian loans may have disturbed that pattern.
>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]....>
The glides in such cases IME can vary from not-at-all to quite
noticeable. True also, to my knowledge, of Spanish, and Indonesian. They
aren't of course written in Engl. Span. or Indo.-- but prior to Official
Romanization of Malay/Indo., they often were. A holdover from the Arabic
script, perhaps.
> If -a- is the first element, the chance
>of hiatus rises, but some may put in a glottal stop.>
I can't think of with a single form in my (fairly standard Midwest)
Engl. with [...aV...] except furrin loans like "paella". I believe
Southern US, with [a] or [A] for my /ay/, would avoid hiatus in words like
"tire, fire" by simply lengthening the [a] -- [ta:r] [fa:r], though the /r/
may be a schwa. I don't think I've ever heard [ta?@(r)] or [fa?@r].
>An [h] is another possibility, even [r] in some dialects.>
My phonetics teacher suggested "voiced h".......
>And some insertions may even go across word
>boundaries. Kennedy was ridiculed as calling
>Cuba "Cuber" [kju.b@r] -- but what he was doing
>took place only when another vowel followed.
>Thus his "..Cuba can..." would not have the intrusive
>[r] but his "..Cuba is..." would have it.>
One reason for the ridicule: those who speak the standard dialect
(basically midwestern) are (or were, in my day) definitely given the
impression that those stray r's are very "ignorant" and "low-class". In my
grade-school days, there was a handful of kids who said "idear" and "sofer"
(sofa), much to the teachers' wrath. (It's hard to say where the feature
came from--it didn't follow the Eastern US rule-- and they didn't say
"Cuber")
>Many languages do seem to have hiatus, but I have
>no idea how many. It seems to exist in many words
>in Spanish, for example, though in other words
>diphthongization takes place>
True, as in "continúo" /kontinúo/ 'I continue' vs. "continuo" /kontínwo/
'continuous'; or "país" /país/ 'country' vs. the 2d pl. ending "-áis"
/-ays/. etc. Hard to say what, if anything, occurs between the [a] and [i]
of "país". I'm not sure how Spanish deals with "...aa..." as in the names
Saavedra, or Sahagún.
>I do not note it in Klingon.>
Again, basically a (C)VC-root language.
>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?>