Re: phi-theta [was: Hellenish oddities]

At 5:41 pm -0500 22/11/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Fakatinál kúsal Láiman Bláun (Raymond Brown):
>> Yes, of course you do.  [pt_h] would be pretty difficult IMO, holding the
>> aspiration off till the second plosive.
>
>Hunh?  I find [pt_h] quite easy, especially if it's intervocalic, while
>[p_ht_h] sounds like too many aspirations.
Intervocalic is another matter, as we know from the long thread about
'ambisyllabic' consonants, "hidden gemination" etc.   We were IIRC talking
about _initial_ combinations.

>
>> Er, yes.  In fact, being an anglophone and thus normally aspirating initial
>> voiceless plosives, [p_ht_h] is the easy one.  It's the [pt], as in the
>> colloquial French pronunciation of "p'tit" that's the awkward one!
>
>Unless you count the ultrashort pause between the [p] and the [t],
>[pt_h] is the way I'd start "potato" if I were to say it really fast,
>with the tongue starting on its way to the roof of the mouth the moment
>the lips open.  In Langeford's Introduction to Phonetics, he calls that
>an "open transition", if I understood him correctly.
I don't, of course, know how you say "potato" but IME Brit English doesn't
have either [p_ht_h] or [pt_h] as syllable initial combos.  IME "potato" is
/p@'tejt@w/ or /'tejt@w/ or /'tejt@/, the latter normallu pronounced
['t_hej?@].

It should be remembered that ancient Greek /pt/ developed from an earlier
*/pj/ --> *[pç], and likelwise /phth/ <-- *[phçh] <-- */phj/.  I imagine
that in the latter case the aspiration affected the whole /phj/ combo, i.e.
the /j/ was *[phçh] from the start.  This would be another reason why Greek
phi-theta means what it says, especially as the combo [p_ht_h] actually
does occur in known natlangs.

Ray.

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