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Re: Vowels?

From:Bob Greenwade <bob.greenwade@...>
Date:Monday, January 28, 2002, 20:29
At 12:42 AM 1/26/02 +0100, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Bob Greenwade <bob.greenwade@...>: > > > As a general rule, the only consonants that should be allowed as > > vowels > > are the trills and approximants (r, l, and their relatives). If she > > can > > figure out how to treat a fricative, nasal, or even plosive consonant as > > a > > vowel and make it sound natural (even though I'd say the latter was > > impossible), then more power to her. > > > >Well, your general rule doesn't completely hold, since among languages >which use syllabic consonants, the most used ones happen to be the nasals >(50% of those languages only have nasals as sylabic consonants). They are >more often used as syllable peaks than the trills and approximants >together!!! :)
That's a large part of why it's a *general* rule (along with English words like "rotten," which many dialects render treating the "n" as a vowel -- though in the case of English, I'd call it a special case rather than an actual vowel). --- Bob's Original Hero Stuff Page! [Circle of HEROS member] http://www.angelfire.com/super2/bobgreenwade/original.htm Music from Bob's Computer! (CD now available!) http://mp3.com/BobsComputer Want more hits to your web page? http://nomorehits.com/cgi-bin/start.cgi?referrer=bobgreenwade http://ads.clickthru.net/bannerlink?host=264157&ban=4