Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, February 2, 2003, 3:16 |
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Joseph Fatula scripsit:
> > One of my examples was 'unfortunately', which has the root 'fortune',
> > in which '-tune' makes 'tchoon' in most, if not every, English dialect.
>
> Oh. Well, it's not quite "tchoon" in every English dialect. The "tune" of
> "unfortunately" reduces down quite a bit for me. It ends up being
> /@nfortSnI'li/. And in words where it doesn't reduce down that much, it's
> like "chin", as in "fortune"/"four chin".
>
> So if we change "fortune" to "fortchoon", some of us would be writing
> "forchin". And the spelling reform throws all the dialect barriers into the
> written language.
RI in fact leaves words with unstressed "tu" pronounced /tS@/ alone:
century, actual, habitual, perpetual, actuate, statue, e.g. Also
a raft of words in "-ture" are left alone. Changing them would not be
diaphonetic, and in any case the spelling serves as a good guide to the
pronunciation, since the change from /tj/ to /tS/ is fairly systematic
in that group.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
--_The Hobbit_