Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 02:07:12AM +1100, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> Well, I'm talking about *my own* perceptions, so what you do is hardly
> relevant to me :P
Didn't mean to imply otherwise . . . just making a comparison.

> I never worked out that hectare and decibel were
> composed because their pronunciations are smashed together, because the
> prefixes are rare to the point of never occurring without those units,
> and because the units are rare to the point of never occurring without
> those prefixes.
Right.  And I wasn't questioning your perceptions or experience.  All I
was trying to say was that I don't think the smashed pronunciation is
necessarily related to the rarity of the components, since it also
happens with "kilometer".

> OTOH, I *am* intrigued by your /lO/ there;
Slashes.  Not brackets.  So not YAEPT! :)  Diachronically, the English
phoneme in question is a "short o", so I wrote it /O/, even though in my
'lect it is, in fact, generally realized as [a]~[A].  The sound [O] is
pretty rare in my speech, occuring mainly before /r/ (which is itself
actually [r\] or something thereabouts).

-Marcos