Re: more English orthography

At 5/17/00 07:52 PM -0400, you wrote:

>> also [tSa] occurs IIRC.
>
>/tS/ and /dZ/ can occur before any vowel except /e/, and are therefore
>phonemes, since a contrast can exist between /ta/ and /tSa/, for
>instance.  Looking in my Japanese-English dictionary, I found a minimal
>pair quite quickly - cha ("tea") and ta ("rice field")
This gap should make you suspicious.  Another thing that should make you
suspicious it that only the alveolar obstruents cannot be palatalized.  Why
not
and is there a connection?  Absolutely!  Palatalization may only occur before
the vowel /a, o, u/, not before /e, i/.  You can have, for example, kya, kyo,
kyu but not *kye, *kyi.  Alveolar obstruents are palatalized before /i/: s ->
S, t -> tS, z -> dZ, d -> dZ before /i/.  The reason is an obvious
assimilation.  So check out the correspondance.

kya     sya [Sa]                zya [dZa]       tya [tSa]               dya
[dZa]
kyo     syo [So]                zyo [dZo]       tyo [tSo]               dyo
[dZo]
kyu     syu [Su]                zyu [dZu]       tyu [tSu]               dyu
[dZu]
*kye    *sye [Se]       *zye [dZe]      *tye [tSe]      *dye [dZe]
*kyi    *syi [Si]               *zyi [dZi]      *tyi [tSi]              *dyi
[dZi]

In otherwords, the "phonemes" S, tS, dZ are palatalized obstruents.  Assuming
this analysis, the match with what is actually found is perfect.

Marcus