Re: NATLANG: o 0? re: consonant clusters

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