Re: THEORY: more questions

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 02:30:54PM +0100, Carsten Becker wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've got more thinks I don't know what they mean or I just wanted to know why it is as it is:
I'll take a shot at answering a few of these:

>   a.. open/close syllables
A syllable that ends with a vowel is called open.  A syllable that ends
with a consonant is called closed.  (The end of a syllable is sometimes called
the "coda".)

>   f.. What are "sonorants"?
Vowel-like sounds; sounds which can constitute a syllable by themselves.
Besides the actual vowels you have things like vocalic nasals and
liquids (nnnnnnn, llllllllll, rrrrrrrr).  Sonority is actually a
continuum rather than a binary, and the relative sonority of consonants
usually figures in the rules for making clusters out of them.


>   g.. What is an "umlaut"?
Umlaut (which in the general sense is a collective noun, not
a countable one) is a type of vowel change with a grammatical
function.  Specifically, it is the sort of change that resulted
from an old grammatical ending *-i causing earlier vowels in
the word to "move toward" /i/ in their pronunciation as the speaker
prepared to pronounce the -i.  So the vowels started to be pronounced
further forward (/u/->/y/) and/or higher (/o/->/2/) in the mouth.
Over time the *-i was lost and only the vowel change remained.

German indicates umlaut typographically by adding the double-overdot
diacritic, but often the vowel letter itself just changes in the
orthography; this is the case in English, for instance, which has
several plurals formed by umlaut.

-Mark