Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)
| From: | David Peterson <digitalscream@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, November 3, 2001, 19:54 |
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<<Not quite, as you've got /a/ with /i:/. By the way,
would that glottal stop be the reason why Hawaii is
sometimes spelt as Hawai'i ?>>
Yes, but as I mentioned, I disagree with the practice. Since it's
impossible to have two like vowels next to each other without a glottal stop
inserted in between, why write an apostrophe? It just slows down writing.
There are glottal stops in the language between other vowels, so that you do
get minimal pairs. My favorite is with /au/. There is:
au [au]
a'u [a?u]
'au [?au]
'a'u [?a?u]
How they can tell that there's a glottal stop at the beginning of a
word without a preceding word is beyond me. Oh, and those four all mean
different things, but you're just going to have to trust me, since I'm away
from all my Hawaiian materials. ~:D Ahhhh, what a language! I made up a
list of proto words yesterday and made a bunch of sound changes to make the
words look Hawaiiany, and I think I did pretty well. When I get to doing
anything else with it, I'll post something.
<<In other words, they're very soft. =)>>
No: In other words, they're fricatives. And English doesn't even have
voiced consonants in most environments; how would you know?
<<Anyway, I think we should just agree to disagree on this, lest someone
get hurt. =P>>
I don't know... There were a lot of people agreeing with me and me
agreeing with them. Anyway, the first sound babies make is usually [pA], or
if not that, usually always voiceless, since voiceless sounds are easier to
make. And the fact that [s] is "louder" than other obstruents has to do with
something other than volume. It's the most sonorant of all the sonorants--at
least, the English [s]. Try making an apical [s]--it's far less sonorant.
Anyway, I'm becoming increasingly bored with this. Let's just say that, for
obvious reasons, "soft" and "hard" or even "lenis" and "fortis" are not good
ways of explaining sounds--it should be done phonetically, if at all.
-David
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