Re: Syllabic consonants (was: Re: Beek)
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 1:56 |
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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.
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