Re: Optimum number of symbols

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> >
> >No you can't,
>
> I can't figure out what part of my message above could possibly take "No
> you
> can't" as an answer. Anyways ...
>
Sorry, a misreading of the sentence made me answer this way :(( . I meant
simply that this view was in my opinion not correct.

>
> You learn something new everyday. Just to be perfectly clear: there is
> final
> pronounced [d] that cannot be blamed on a following, normally
> unpronounced,
> schwa, left there by linguistic history or later analogy?
>
I must say on this case I don't understand this question. What does linguistic
history has to do with it, we're talking about synchronic phenomena?! Whatever
the origin of this final /d/ doesn't matter. It just happens to exist, and
often can't be said to be followed by a normally unpronounced schwa (even if
historically it was). Final schwas are getting rarer and rarer in French, which
seems to accept more and more complicated clusters (I for instance have no
trouble pronouncing "grande femme" [gRa~d'fam] without schwa, and I actually
never pronounced it that way). So even if it was originally there, a synchronic
description cannot include it, since it's actually never pronounced. It would
be a rather artificial way to make this /d/ non-final just to explain why the
supposed /d/ in "grand" behaves the way it does. It's an analysis which could
have been correct about 50 years ago. Not anymore.

The final schwa, when it appears, seems more and more dissociated from its
etymological place (for instance, I sometimes hear people say [mE@] for |mais|,
in a position where it never ever was etymological :)) ). It becomes a purely
phonetic phenomenon.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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