Re: H

In a message dated 3/13/01 11:41:46 PM, hobbit@MAIL.EARTHLIGHT.CO.NZ writes:

<< I am meditating on a problem at the moment and that is the value of [h]
in a Romance creole.  I posted a couple of weeks ago a Babel text that I
had developed from Lingua Franca for a language I call Feringistani.
Arabic influences has meant that this language has borrowed pronominal
suffixes which include [-h] him/his and [-ha] her.  This means the
language has constrast like:

nome/nomeh 'name/his name'
sta/stah 'be/be him'

Now I am wondering what value this [-h] has if it is remained
productive.  If it has become silent then it may be articulated at the
end of words.  If it has become silent, as h has elsewhere then it may
have caused a change in stress /'nome/~/no'me/, similar to Tokana, or
altered pronunciation in some other way.  Which option would make better
sense, considering the context?
 >>

I have another suggestion.  In Sardinian, I believe, when compared to
Spanish, all the words that began with /h/ and were realized as nothing, or a
glottal stop (another possibility), changed to [f] (or maybe it was a
bilabial voiceless fricative; the data didn't specify).  So, that's another
alternative.

-David