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Re: The [??] attribute

From:Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>
Date:Friday, September 6, 2002, 15:00
Emaelivpahr Roger Mills:
> Apparently I'm a pedant-- I distinguish both words quite clearly in
pronunciation. M-W has the pronunciation as /m&'men(")tO/ which is what I normally use myself, except that the & vowel is very short -- as is their sound file example of the word. Is there a way to mark for an extremely short vowel? When I say "memento," I start in on the second syllable almost immediately after starting the &. 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'm wondering if these two questions aren't related... could my pronunciation of "memento" be described as having a syllabic m at the beginning? Probably not -- that would something more like "mmmmento," with a "mmm" like "mmm, that's tasty," wouldn't it? -- Arthaey Che'lorav v'eshalndaseh t'ves che'llav mlaetml shadiln kes.

Replies

Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>