Re: Romanized Orthography of My Conlang
From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, November 2, 1999, 3:46 |
Going back to the 22nd of October:
I wrote:
> Ed Heil wrote:
> > Oh, surely "reheat" is /ri$hit/ and "singing" is /siN$iN/ where $ is
> > syllable division, no?
>
> Perhaps, but it seems rather artificial to say draw syllable-boundaries
> that way. The only way I know of to indicate objectively
> syllable-boundaries is that English vowels are short before
> syllable-final voiceless obstruents (/sit/ vs. /si:/ or /si:d/)
Well, I remembered something: English has a special rule for
syllabification, where intervocalic consonants go with the preceding
vowel IF that vowel is stressed, which explains why "happy" is [h&pi]
and not *[h&:p_hi], the allophonic shortening of the vowel and the
unaspirated form of /p/ are due to the fact that the word is syllabified
as /h&p.i/ rather than /h&.pi/ (also, /&/ normally can't occur in
syllable-final position)
So, /rihit/ is /ri'hit/ while /siNiN/ is /'siN.iN/, due to the stress.
Thus, it's probably true that /N/ can't occur before a stressed vowel
(which pretty much goes without saying since, as far as I can tell, /N/
only occurs in English at the end of roots and before velar consonants)
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