Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, at 11:53  AM, Roger Mills wrote:

> Somewhere, I think in Gleason's intro. textbook, I've seen the entire
> schema
> for Engl. monosyllables (native and generally known/assimilated
> foreign).
> It's incrediby complex. Just a sampling
>
> 1. Initially
> --any single C (includes /c j/ i.e. tS, dZ, excludes N)
> --any stop + r (excludes /c j/ )
> --any stop, except t/d and c/j, + l
> --s + the above
> --S + r natively, S + some others in mostly non-native,  German/Yiddish
> derived (shmooze, shtick, schlep, shvants (sp.? it's Germ/Yidd..
> Schwanz)
> etc.)
> --certain specifiable C + w, y (lots of limitations and non-native
> here, and
> it depends on how you view "long u" pronounced [ju]...is it C+y or is
> [ju] a
> V?)
> -- certain fricatives + r/l (except s+r and s+h, and s+f/v only in
> non-native; T/D can't cluster at all)
> etc. etc. till the brain starts to hurt..........
>
> The situation in final position is vastly more complicated, and I
> won't get
> into that.  But consider /mpts/ in "exempts" , "sixths" /sIksTs/ ,
> "parked"
> /parkt/ just for a few.  (Again, it depends on how you view /V+rC/, is
> the r
> actually a consonant, or a modification to the vowel-- in the case of
> [3^]
> (US bird) it does seem to be a unit unto itself.)
>
> And that's just the monosyllables..............
I couldn't find it in Gleason's text, but it did remind me of a paper
written by Eric Fudge and published in the Journal of Linguistics in
1969. The title is simply "Syllables". It is full of bristly looking
trees and distributional formulae.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we
must learn both arts."                                      - Thomas
Carlyle