Re: Cwendaso: when two diphthongs collide

Isidora Zamora sikyal:

> Ok, here I begin to enter into the realm of the absurd, putting four vowels
> in sequence and seeing which ones come out on top.  I created 6 new verbs
> and 6 new nouns for this excercize but used yesterday's prefixes.  The
> examples are written up a little differently than the ones in my previous
> posts.
Sorry for the late post, but I've been busy lately :).

> The most notable thing is that two like diphtongs coalesce into one instead
> of the high vowel in the first vowel becoming a glide.
You could explan this as haplology: the reduction of adjacent identical
parts of a sentence. Otherwise, this looks good.

Except, that don't you have <ai-eu> for example, behaving differently from
<ai-e>? That doesn't really seem right to me.

But maybe it can work. Here's a thought: perhaps syllable weight plays a
part in vowel reduction?  Consider a hypothetical word like /kai-edu/,
which IIRC reduces to [kai.du]. Before reduction, we have /ka.ye.du/--so
we can look at this as reducing the syllable /ye/ to /i/ by dropping the
/e/. Now, in the word /kai-eudu/ we have /ka.yeu.du/ before reduction--but
in this word reduction doesn't happen. That's because the middle syllable
/yeu/ is heavy (has a coda), and so cannot be reduced. Perhaps this
explains the different behavior of diphthongs?

And you can still use haplology to account for the exceptions.

This implies that something like /kai-ekka/ doesn't reduce to [kaik.ka],
but remains [ka.jek.ka]. Essentially, it boils down to a prohibition of
superheavy syllables, which contain both a diphthong and a coda consonant.

Do with this as you'd like.

--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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