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Re: NATLANG: o 0? re: consonant clusters

From:Tristan <kesuari@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 11, 2002, 20:12
Robert B Wilson wrote:

>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. >
Yeah, I know. I've heard and made pronunciations with /r/ right before a consonant (I'm non-rhotic) because the schwas once there dropped out. (This isn't a regular thing, though.
>>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"... >
It must've had a different Frenche from mine. Mine didn't have the word _legale_ and I think had a word that corresponds to English 'transactions'. You compare 'transaction' to 'trade', and one becomes a multi-syllable behemoth. (I think it had fewer words, so probably a word that meant something like 'illegal' but not quite, but it still took a fair amount more space.) Tristan