Re: NATLANG: o 0? re: consonant clusters

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 20:01:24 +1100 Tristan <kesuari@...> writes:
> Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> >Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Yes indeed. Which shows how strange English is, which keeps
> untouched clusters
> >>like /sk-/ and /st-/, but simplified clusters like /kn-/, /ks-/ or
> /gz-/, and
> >>still does synchronically :)) .
> >>
> >>
> But! But! That's because /st-/ is easy to pronounce, but /gz-/
> isn't!
> (There, a definitive statement!) Gah, just you wait until someone
> decides the /@/ is a terrorist plot to confuse us all or something.
> Then
> we'll all be talking of gzells and the like, so fear not.
i've actually heard the pronounciation [gzEL] for 'gazelle', so it's
already happening...
there seems to be a tendency in english to lose shwas.

> >:-)  It is odd.  But, I suspect that at least part of the reason is
> that
> >/sk/ /st/ /sp/ is more common than /kn/, etc. was.  If we dropped
> the
> >/s/, there'd be *lots* of ambiguity, whereas simplifying, e.g.,
> /kn/ to
> >/n/ only created a few homophones (night/knight, know/no, knot/not,
> >knead/need being the only ones I can think of, and the last of
> those is
> >only homophonous because the GVS also messed with the
> pronunciation).
> >
> >Of course, we could also have gone the Romance route of adding a
> sound,
> >/st/ -> /@st/ or /s@t/ perhaps.
> >
> Yeah, but English has such a thing for nice, short words. I look at
> our
> bathroom scales and it has 'not legal for trade' on it, and then the
> translation into French which is full of multi-syllable behemoths
> that
> you'd think it was German apart from the fact that it looks French
> (and
> it doesn't have quite enough long words quite long enough).
i'm looking at one right now and it says 'NOT LEGAL FOR TRADE' and 'NON
LEGALE POUR LE COMMERCE' (looks like a weird dialect of english to me),
only two syllables longer, AFAICT (i don't understand french orthography
at all, i can understand written french reasonably well, but i can't
understand spoken french at all).  i don't see any "multi-syllable
behemoths"...

> And anyway, any schwa you add I can take away.
english seems to have a tendency to lose shwas rather than add them.

> On a vaguely related note, if you create a syllabic consonant and
> then
> you make it no longer syllabic but rather the combination of a schwa
> and
> the consonant, is the schwa more likely to go before the consonant,
> or
> is this just me making assumptions?
i think it would be more likely to go before the consonant, but i'm not
sure.

> Tristan
Robert Wilson
http://kuvazokad.free.fr/
Yessessë Eru ontanë Menel ar Cemen.
Yessessë ëa Quetta ar Quetta né as Eru ar Eru né Quetta.

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