Re: The [??] attribute
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, September 7, 2002, 4:13 |
|---|
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 19:57:42 -0700, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>
wrote:
>And when they talk about "syllabic consonants," what does this mean in
>practice? A definition I found: "A syllabic consonant is a phonetic element
>that normally patterns as a consonant, but may fill a vowel slot in a
>syllable." One of the examples given is the word "bottom" -- but why don't they
>describe this as /bAtVm/ with a very short V? (I'm from California, in case
>we're known for having a strange pronunciation of this word. :)
I don't think I've ever heard "bottom" with a syllabic consonant. I think a
better example, at least in American English, would be "kitten". I don't
normally pronounce any vowel in the second syllable of "kitten" between the
/t/ (which in this word I usually pronounce as a glottal stop) and the /n/,
but instead the /n/ sound acts as the vowel in the syllable. But I'm from
Michigan, and I don't know for certain if "kitten" is pronounced with a
syllabic /n/ in California.
Swahili has a syllabic /m/ in words like _mti_ "tree" or _mtu_ "person".
Czech has syllabic /l/ in words like _vlk_ "wolf" and syllabic /r/ in words
like _prst_ "finger". Even voiceless sounds like /s/ can be syllabic in
some languages (or marginally in English, in the word "psst"). It all
depends on the particular language's definition of a syllable.
--
languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>---
hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
@io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
\ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin