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Re: childish pronunciation of "Christophe"

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Friday, March 12, 1999, 15:09
Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:
> > Christophe is pronounced /KRistOf/ in French, and when she was
young, my
> sister couldn't pronounce it at all (until she was three or four!). She > first pronounced it /tita/ with a very open /a/, and then /titOf/, and
this
> form was my nickname in my family for years (even an uncle of mine still > continues to use it in fact! Now my mother calls me /titi/, which is a
well
> known word in very informal French, and makes us remember of the /tita/
and
> /titOf/ stages).
Oh, yes. I was /'palo/ and my brother Gasto'n was /a'ton/ to our little cousins. <g>
> > What's interesting in that is the fact that I can recognize in
this
> childish pronunciation of my name some phonological changes that seem to > occur often in languages, I mean: > > - loss of s and f in coda position in a syllable (very often for s in > Southern American Spanish as I discovered it in this list),
Indeed, as I was telling Josh and Nick -- at least Rioplatense is practically losing all non-nasal codas (fricatives tend to become /h/ as in "nafta", "reloj", "esto"; /r/ lengthens the previous vowel).
> - Assimilation of the sound of the 't' to the first cluster /KR/.
Why could that be? I mean, if any of the sounds /KR/ were dental or at least front, it would seem more likely. I guess /t/ is one of the simplest sounds to pronounce.
> So what do you think of it? Do you think it's only a coincidence
or not? I think it has to do on easy of recognition and pronouncing. There has been a lot of research on how children acquire speech (in which order they learn to pronounce different sounds, etc.) but I really don't know of any sources to direct you to. --Pablo Flores * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Ginsberg's Restatement of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics: You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit.