Re: Status of Italian rising

At 5:22 AM -0500 12/9/02, Jeff Jones wrote:
>On Sun, 8 Dec 2002 23:47:48 +0100, Mangiat <mangiat@...> wrote:
>
>>Hi!
>>
>>This is the English translation of a question I'm going to send to my
>>teacher of linguistics in the forthcoming future. I'd like you to have a
>>look, before... thanks;-) That's abour the status of Italian rising
>>diphthongs.
>>
>>I can't figure out why linguists tend to describe both the components of
>>falling diphthongs as vocoids (with high /i/ and /u/ lacking sillabicity),
>>while only the second element of rising diphthongs is hold as a vocoid and
>>the first one is described as an approximant (a contoid). Turning over the
>>problem in my hear I've got to the impression that this solution was
>>verbatim imported from descriptions of English and/or German phonologies,
>>where it actually makes sense, and exploited to fit the Italian situation-
>>which it doesn't fit like a glove.
>
>I don't understand why linguists do some things either!
>Aren't approximants vocoids? (well, I know *lateral* approximants have been
>considered to be non-vocoids (I assume that's what's meant by "contoid"),
>but this has never made sense to me from the purely phonetic viewpoint,
>either acoustically or in terms of articulation.) It seems to me that
>phonetics and phonology don't have to correspond, and that phonology is
>language dependent. Your analysis looks OK to me, though, and I didn't see
>anything wrong with your translation.
The labels "vocoid" and "contoid" are assigned to segments based on their function
in syllable structure, but I find them to be misleading; you can have "vocoids"
which are not very vowel-like, for instance. I prefer the terms "peak" and
"margin"; the peak of a syllable is the point of highest sonority, and the
margins surround the peak and are of lower sonority. Thus [l] is the peak of
the second syllable of 'little'. Now the interesting question is whether both
elements of a diphthong are part of the peak, or if there is a peak-margin
sequence (or margin-peak for rising diphthongs).

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson