Re: THEORY: h huffnpuffery (was: RE: varia)

Raymond Brown wrote:

> And, of course, (3) follows only if one accepts that [h] is essentially an
> unvoiced, non-syllabic _vowel_, and not a consonant.  Phonologically [h]
> cannot function as a vowel since it cannot be the center of a syllable;
> indeed, phonologically, a non-syllabic vowel is an nonsense - phonetically,
> one may possibly have such a thing.
>
> Kenneth Pike attempted to avoid confusion by using the terms terms vowel &
> consonant solely for phonological analysis, coining the terms 'vocoid' and
> 'contoid' for phonetic definitions.  Thus, e.g. /l/ is a vocoid, but
> functions phonologically as a consonant in 'fill' but a vowel in 'fiddle'.
>
> If one accepts Ladgefoid's analysis above, then [h] is, presumably, a
> vocoid but functions as a consonant in English.  However, there seems one
> weakness in this.  AFAIK all vocoids _may_ act as centers of syllables; I
> fail to see how [h] can ever do that.
I think that "syllabic [h]" would be a fair, if somewhat too vague,
description of the "unvoiced vowels" one sometimes finds in American
Indian languages.  (One would also have to specify the quality of the
vowel to make the description at all adequate.)


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