Re: Vowels?

 Bob Greenwade <bob.greenwade@...> writes:

> 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).
>
[ra?n=] <rotten>
What do you mean a special case? It's certainly a full fledged vowel for me in the
words that have it.....which are in the thousands i'm sure.

Elliott Lash