Re: Georgian consonant clusters and syllables

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Tim May :
>
> >http://mysite.freeserve.com/butsuri/clusters/clusters.html
> >
> >Christophe, you might want to listen to these and see if they sound
> >less monosyllabic than the recording you heard.
>
> I've listened to them, and indeed in those recordings the epenthetic schwas
> are definitely here. They are not the recordings I once heard (in the
> recordings I heard, I remember how I was surprised that "vprtskvni" was
> really monosyllabic.
>
> >   It might be that we
> >just have different tolerances for what we perceive as a pure cluster
> >(Tristan, who I sent them to before, agrees with my impression).
>
> And I agree with you too. But I'd be surprised if those recordings were
> really from a native speaker. After all, even *I* can reproduce "vprtskvni"
> as a single syllable :)) .
I can pronounce that without any epenthetics, but I cannot do an "r" between
two consonants of higher sonority without it sounding like a syllable peak. Is
there any watertight definition of what constitutes a syllable?

FYI, not knowing what kind of "r" Georgian uses, I say it with a voiceless
retroflex approximant.

                                                     Andreas

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