Re: Questions about Schwa and Stress

At 4:46 am -0400 13/10/01, David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 10/12/01 10:12:32 PM, steven@OLYWA.NET writes:
>
><< I REALLY need to know whether there are any languages in which vowels never
>
>reduce to schwa. >>
>
>    Spanish.  At least, Mexican Spanish; I won't vouch for any of the other
>myriad countries.
Nor in Castillian Spanish, nor (modern) Greek.

I don't think vowels ever reduce to shwa in the Bantu languages - certainly
not in Swahili, Zulu or Xhosa - nor AFAIK the many Polynesian languages.

Reduction of vowels to shwa seems to be a characteristic of languages with
strong stress accent, especially if, as in English & Russian, the stress is
free and unpredictable.

[snip]
>
>    Also, my historical linguistics professor claims that there are no schwas
>in French.  Is this true?
------------------------------------------------------------

At 8:13 pm +0100 13/10/01, Dan Jones wrote:
>David Peterson wrote:
>>    Also, my historical linguistics professor claims that there are no schwas
>>in French.  Is this true?
>
>Very true- there are also no diphthongs in English.
...and a flock of pigs is flying right past my window  ;)

'Tis true, however, the French shwa is rounded, unlike the /@/ in English
"the" /D@/, and is phonetically unstressed [¦].  But it is phonemically
quite distinct from /¦/.

It is also true that French shwa has an allophonic zero variant, i.e. "je"
may be [Z¦] or [Z] according to context; it is usually regarded as
phonemically /Z@/.  I can only think David's historical linguistics
professor has some other, 'non-traditional' (non-phonemic?) way of
explaining this feature of modern French.

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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