Re: Metathesis?

Andreas:
> [tSIpolti]? What's kind of pronounciation is that?
>
> I'd expected the naive English prounciation to be [tSIpowtl=]
> or thereabouts.
As Paul suggested, it's important that the word does not in
fact look like an English word. Therefore people give it a
foreignizing pronunciation.  Normally, this would mean a /Z/
somewhere, but in this instance there's nothing that would
obviously take /Z/.  The metathesis is because English really
hates the onset /tl/, and people aren't sure if it should
have a heavy second syllable or not.  So they make a hash
of it.


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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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