Re: Two seperate questions: Rhoticity/Topic-Comment

On Dec 9, 2006, at 7:05 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Among sonorant consonants the scale actually looks
> something like:
>
> 1.    [n]   >  [n=]  >  [A~]  >  [A]
> 2.    [m]   >  [m=]  >  [u~]  >  [u]
>   or        >  [m=]  >  [A~]  >  [Á]
> 3.    [D]   >  [j]   >  [i]
>   or        >  [0]
[...]

Are you using > to mark sound changes, or to show ranking on the
sonority hierarchy? If it's the latter, you have the direction
backwards (except that I think *any* sound would be more sonorous
than 0, i.e. no sound, so [D] > 0 would be correct).

> FWIW the only 'non-rhotic' Romance lang I know of is
> Catalan, but there probably are others on the dialectal
> level.
I know at least some varieties of Portuguese delete final /r/, and I
think I heard about some varieties of Spanish that do as well.