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Re: Syllabic consonants (was: Re: Beek)

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 1:56
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 15:25:38 -0400, Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
wrote:

>To me it just seemed to be a logical thing to do as soon as I had made up >the phonotactic constraint that liquid+nasal clusters were illegal (I >already knew that the language had syllabic sonorants.) BTW, in the native >orthography, AFAIK, it is not notated whether a sonorant consonant is >syllabic or not. It should be transparent to speakers/readers when to >pronounce them syllabic and when to pronounce them consonental. > >I wonder if any natural language alternates them like this?
Varieties of English that have syllabic "r" in words like "winter" (vs. "wintry" with a consonantal r). Apparently some varieties of English also do this with "l", considering the ancient joke "Do you like Kipling?" -- "I don't know; I've never kippled!" You could also compare it with vowel gradation in Sanskrit, where "bhrta" with a syllabic "r" in the past participle corresponds with "bharati" with a consonantal "r" in the present tense. -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

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Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>