Re: Extra Syllabic Consonants

Firstly, sorry for vanishing. For the last two days I've been keeping a
friend and groom-to-be company and then being the usher at his wedding,
so I haven't really had time to reply. I'm still pretty out of it now in
fact, since I've gotten little sleep for the last two days.

>
>> shared structural properties of languages fail. I tend to take a more
>> descriptivist view of things: I'd use a concept if it works for
>> describing a particular language or makes that language easier to
>> describe, and discard it if it doesn't.
>
>
> Exactly. Concepts like phoneme are just useful abstractions which can
> make the description of a language easier; but many of us, I guess,
> have come across instances where the phonemic approach seems to fall
> down. Then i look for a more apt description. My approach is
> essentially empirical.
I think one of the biggest things that puts me off modern linguistics is
that so many of its practitioners seem to have rejected the empirical
approach... the field linguistic whose interest is mainly in the
practical and real world would come away very disappointed from a lot of
modern linguistics courses it seems to me.

>
>>> The problem I think with Bella Coola is that there seem to be no
>>> restrictions whasoever in the clusters for the most part. There is
>>> no restriction as far as I can tell forbidding words like:
>>
>>
>>
>> k'p't' [k_>p_>t_>]
>>
>> or, to take an example from a language called Klamath,
>>
>> gank@nktktdamna
>>
>> with long sequences of stops.
>
>
> Yes, but how are these long sequences of stops pronounced? Even if you
> put your tongue etc through all those stop positions, what audible
> sound is produced? I would dearly like to *hear* these words.
>
>
Undoubtedly short (much shorter than true vowels) vocoidal segments
whose quality isn't contrastive may be produced from a phonetic point of
view, since there's no way that I can imagine you can move your tongue
fast enough changing POAs etc not to produce such sounds, but I think
the essential point is that from a phonological point of view there are
no vowels in those sequences. You yourself pointed out the difference
between a vowel and a voicoid, and the fact that the two are not the
same. :)
 I was wondering about something else incidentally: It's unclear to me
whether in Bella Coola (Nuxalk) extrasyllabic consonants can occur in
between full syllables in roots or only occur at root edges. For
example, kxalxal and xalxalk seem to be wellformed roots in Nuxalk, but
is xalkxal a well formed root, or is the medial extrasyllabic consonant
illegal? The second paper I linked to claims that some languages permit
medial extrasyllabic consonants, but I've been unable to figure out if
this is the case for Nuxalk. Certainly, the majority of languages which
show strong signs of extrasyllabic consonants in roots seem to prefer
having them on the edges.

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