Re: Pronouns revised and word generation

Quoting Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>:

> > Also, I realized that it was bad form to have a very
> > rare sound (the glottal stop), so I amend my reflexive
> > pronouns to aha-, ehe-, ...
>
> Huh? Is it really rare? As a phoneme, it s present in an awful lot of
> languages, not to mention the cases when it is a phonetic thing, where
> it's virtually omnipresent :-) I'd say that the forms you cite (aha-...)
> would tend to merge into long vowels (well, in my language they did :-))
Well, I think it's fair to say that /?/ or [?] are *more*
marked than other stops at other places of articulation,
like /p t k/ ~ [p t k].  /h/ ~ [h] is in a rather similar
situation.

But "rare", I'd agree probably not.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

Reply