Re: CHAT: Guessing games (was: Middle English question)

> Date:         Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:28:01 -0600
> From: dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
> On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> > [?] is a glottal gesture that
> > occurs on the last voiced part of a syllable --- which may be after
> > the vowel proper, on a nasal or liquid for instance --- and consists
> > of a transition from clear phonation to almost complete interruption
> > of air flow, and a return to _creaky_ phonation).
>=20
> This is st=F8d, right? I understand that occurence of st=F8d is cognate w=
ith
> the tonal stuff going on in neighboring Northern Germanic languages, but
> not being a Germanicist myself, can't be sure about this.
Right. The common origin is an accent difference between old mono- and
disyllabic stems, which merged during the syncope period (600 to 800
CE). Of course, once it was lexicalized as a feature, it spread and
narrowed and moved around the lexicon in the usual unpredictable way,
and after a thousand years the distribution can be very different from
one dialect to another a few miles away. So I don't think knowing the
tonal accents of Modern Swedish will be any great help with placing
the st=F8d in Modern Danish.

Anyway, I avoided the name 'st=F8d' because I wanted to focus on a more
explicit phonetic description. But it may be useful to note that like
other types of accent it's a feature of the phonetic word, and readily
gets lost in compounding and derivation --- so my use of an IPA symbol
for the consonant 'glottal stop' /glO?l=3DstVp_}/ is a bit misleading.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marke=
d)