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Re: Chinese Dialect Question

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Thursday, October 2, 2003, 23:16
JS Bangs wrote:
> True. However, singular examples of gemination aren't unknown, and can be > phonologically useful. This actually poses a question: In those dialects > of Spanish that have a vowel quality difference in closed syllables, does > the first syllable of /perro/ behave differently from the one in /pero/?
Non-native speaker says, no, and suspects the word is syllabified pe-rro; both would have the more open [E] allophone that occurs before a rhotic.
> > Not necessarily. I'd look at it this way: there's a single phoneme /r/, > pronounced [r] initially and finally and [4] medially, and of course when > two /r/'s collide they fuse to [r].
This is mildly troublesome to me-- all the exs. of -rr- with a known Romance history had, IIRC, -rr- already in Latin/Proto Rom. I'm not sure, but theoretically Italian ought to retain the same contrast /r/:/rr/. Also, a lot of the exs. of -rr- in Span. are of non-Romance origin (or at least, unique to Spain).