Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

En réponse à Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:

>
> We thought you were going to provide words for us to borrow to
> strengthen the phonemicity of them? We were trying to be advanced and
> ahead of our times so that we wouldn't have any trouble learning
> French
> when they invaded us and brought their bizarre phonemes along. Pity we
> came prepared with /T/ but not with even an allophonic [Z], isn't it?
>
Yep, not very clairvoyant those English ;)))) .

>
> Maggel is a muddle. (Hmm.... I believe there's dialects of English
> that
> pronounce /gl/ as /dl/. So if we did a spelling pronunciation of
> 'Maggel' in these dialects, there almost synonyms!)
>
Hehe, thanks for the compliment! (at least I hope you meant it as a
compliment ;)))) ) The American Heritage Dictionary gives "mental confusion" as
a possible meaning for "muddle". It fits Maggel well :))) .

>
> Not even a hypercorrection? (Or is it hypocorrection. I forget. Damn
> non-rhotic, reduce unstressed vowels to /@/ dialect.)
>
It's indeed hypERcorrection. "Hypocorrection" would mean "under-correction",
i.e. not correcting enough :)))) .

>
> Actually, to be honest, when I first heard that they were different, I
> had to go to some effort to tell the difference---about the same I had
> to go to to distinguish between dark and light /l/ or the difference
> between the vowel in 'ore' and 'all'. But there's absolutely no rhyme
> nor reason to the distribution of /T/ and /D/.
Well, [D] seems to be confined mostly to helping words (pronouns, adverbs,
pronoun-adjectives) in initial position, [T] everywhere else. Indeed you
pointed out that "with" is often pronounced [wiv] or [wiT] rather than [wiD].

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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