Re: Linguistics: Final /?/ and /h/

Roger Mills wrote:

>Rob Haden wrote:
>
>
>>Recently I discussed word-final /?/ and /h/ with someone on another list.
>>We were talking about how common those phonemes are in word-final
>>position.  I argued that they are not very common cross-linguistically,
>>but
>>the other person said that they are.  Does anyone know here?
>>
>>
>>
>My gut feeling would be that /?/ is probably "fairly common", /h/ much less
>so, but I couldn't really cite any statistics.
>
>
>
>
In most colloquial English dialects in England, word-final [?] is quite
common (though it is only an allophone of /t/). I believe Liverpudlian
dialects change that to [h] frequently.  Both are fairly rare in
European languages, though, but quite common elsewhere.

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