Re: Representing Boreanesian (was: Re: quantity triggered vs.

Kristian Jensen wrote:
> C is never empty. Words in Boreanesian that sound like they start
> with a vowel in European ears, actually start with the glottal stop
> /?/. (Actually, I do believe that many Germanic langs do this -
> perhaps also English to a limited extent).
Since you are a Danish speaker I have to ask you this: would you consider
the _st/od_ to be "the same thing" as the initial glottal stop?  Here in
Sweden orthoepists and their ilk condemn the initial glottal stop as a
fault, although it is quite natural to most speakers; after all ther is no
elision in most Swedish varieties.  I've even heard a professional
phonetician argue that the weak glottal stop in Swedish would be some kind
of harmful disorder while the strong Arabic variety is just another
consonant!  Clearly this is the old Swedish prejudice against Danish
pronunciation <sigh>.  In German, OTOH, the glottal stop is gladly admitted
as a phoneme and part of the standard.  Not only do most German speakers
say [?aox di: ?andAn], they even say [feA?aen] for _Verein_; [feraen] and
especially [feRaen] immediately give the stranger away!

> The script thus reflects
> this. There is no need for an explicit vowel letter. Incidentally,
> this also is the way the Buginese/Makassarese script works.
And Tibetan!  Actually Tibetan has three glottal onsets: "voiced h" (which
I transliterate _h_), "voiceless h" (_h'_ in my transliteration) and
glottal stop (_"_ in my transliteration).  In Hlasa dialect both _h_ and
_"_ are optionally, and usually, realized as zero -- without merging, since
_h_ occurs only in low-tone syllables and _"_ only in high-tone syllables.
_H'_ is realized as [x] in Hlasa, but there are Central dialects where it
is a voiceless glottal fricative; it is only found in high-tone syllables.

....................................................................
:             TRANSLITERATION OF TIBETAN ALPHABET                  :
:|| ka k'a qa ga | ^ca ^c'a ^ja ^na | ta t'a da na | pa p'a ba ma |:
:| ca c'a ja | wa ^za za ha | ^ya ra la | ^sa sa h'a "a | i u e o |:
....................................................................

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    <bpj@...>

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