Re: a "natural language" ?

 --- Matt Arriola <azathoth500@...> skrev:
> That's part of it, but mostly sandhi is when a word
> changes because of its surroundings. Like in Arabic,
> the l in the article "al" can be absorbed if the
> first letter of the word it goes to begins with a
> certain letter. And as already mentioned, the tone
> of a word can change because of the words
> surrounding it. That's sandhi.
English has a few examples of sandhi. Examples from my
dialect, right off-hand:

/did you/ ["dI.dZ@]
/would you/ ["wU.dZ@]
/can't you/ ["k&n.tS@]

The [j] in /you/ palatalizes the final alveolar
plosive in the preceding word to a postalveolar
affricate, except when spoken slowly or carefully.
This is pretty much standard in America [*], though
I'm not entirely sure if it exists in other dialect
areas of English.

Sanskrit is notorious for its complicated sandhi,
hence the term 'sandhi' being a Sanskrit word.

[*] An _extreme_ example of sandhi coupled with
haplology and vowel deletion is the stereotypical
Southern 'jeet yet' ["dZit.jEt] for 'did you eat yet'.
It's become a sort of shibboleth for the 'redneck'
subculture around here. Most people would pronounce
the phrase as [,dI.dZu."it.jEt] or more informally, [dZu."it.jEt].