Re: Latin <h>

E fésto John Cowan <cowan@...>:
> Muke Tever scripsit:
>
>> Don't forget the dialects that use [h] for syllable-final /s/.
>> In such a case you could actually have a new /h/ phoneme from the merger
>> of /x/ > [h] and /s/ > [h] (there's a rule somewhere that a single phone
>> cannot be an allophone of two different phonemes) e.g. if you had
>> <reloj>
>> vs. ?<relós>.
>
> AFAIK there are no dialects that both do s > h and x > h.  But as for a
> single phone being an allophone of two different phonemes, in American
> English [4] is an allophone of medial /t/ as well as medial /d/: this
> is a special case of neutralization.
I was going to make this an example earlier, but decided not to.  Now I'll
hafta go over it, which is probably better, as it is a clearer example.

Okay, in AmE you'll have |write| /rajt/ and |ride| /rajd/, with related
forms such as |writer/rider| [raj4@`] and |writing/riding| [raj4iN].
 From morphological relationships like that you could still say that
underlyingly you have /rajt@`/ and /rajd@`/.

However this will not help you at all when [4] appears in a monomorph,
such as [wA4@`].  This is evidence for a /4/ phoneme, albeit a restricted
one; it will only appear intervocalically, and never initially in a
stressed syllable.  [This is suspicious...]  Since it does not contrast
with /t/ or /d/, principle indicates it should be regarded as an allophone
of one, say /d/ to which it is phonetically more similar.

In words where [4] appears across a morpheme boundary, then, you posit a
voicing rule that occurs first: |rajt > rajd- / _[vow]|.  This is not an
unusual rule, but quite parallel to transformations that have already
occurred in English (cf. knife/knives again) and is, incidentally, how the
OED's pronunciations of American English are written: with /d/ for [4]
 from any source.

And I'm fairly certain the dialect of Spanish I hear in my family has both
|s > h / _[., #]| and [x > h].

        *Muke!
--
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