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Re: phi-theta [was: Hellenish oddities]

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Thursday, November 23, 2000, 6:10
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. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================