Re: Georgian phonology [was Re: About Hebrew Emphatics]

Thomas wrote:

"But this has nothing to do with the underlying representation.  The
realization of /v/ as labialization on the preceding consonant in an onset
is a kind of regular allophonic variation."

I agree.

Esperanto has clusters like /gv/ and /kv/ in words like <lingvo> and <kvar>.
I wonder if it would be permissible to say [lingwo] and [kwar]...

"Actually, I was speaking to Howie Aroson, who wrote this article you are
citing, about this very topic of harmonic clusters (which you are presumably
using as evidence for /v/ being not a separate phoneme but a secondary
feature) not three weeks ago in the class he was teaching on Old Georgian.
He does not, nor did he ever, mean to suggest that harmonic clusters were
synchronically in Georgian (old or modern) actual unit phonemes. He does
note that some people have suggested this for a very remote reconstruction
of the protolanguage, but this is not meant to apply to any attested period
of the language.  For all attested periods of the language, harmonic
clusters are to be interpreted more as constraints on root structure.  By
doing so, we can greatly simplify and unify the behavior of root shapes to
just (C)(C)(v)(V) (up to two consonants and /v/ and optionally a vowel).
But this has nothing synchronically to do with the phonetic allomorphy that
you were discussing above."

Sort of related to this, some information on harmonic clusters in Laz
(another Kartvelian language) can be found here:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifl/asw/forschung/projekte/Lasisch/benningwd.pdf

Trebor.

"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
--Chinese proverb

Reply