Re: OT: German reputation

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:15:27 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 04:36:49AM +0000, Stephen Mulraney wrote:
>
>JMW>??? The stress is exactly on the same syllable: On the last. French
>JMW>_adieu_ /a'dj2/, Spanish _adiós_ /a'Djos/.
>
>
>SM> /aDi'os/, surely. Unless I'm mistaken, the accent in Spanish indicates
>SM> stress wherever it deviates from the unmarked penultimate position.
>
>(I don't think it makes sense to use /D/ here - /d/ or [D], no?)
You're right, the usual way to write the phoneme is /d/. However, I think
that the allophone [D] is much more common than [d], and aren't phonemes to
be represented with the sign of their most common allophone?

>The accent is indeed on the last syllable, hence the graphical accent.  The
>question is whether there is one or two syllables before that.  J. Mach
>interprets it as two, and it may sound that way in rapid speech, but my
>Spanish-speaking friends seem to consistently pronounce it with three.
>[a.Di'os], not [a'Djos].  I suppose that makes sense, since it derives from
>the phrase [a'Di.os], but that begs the question - why did the emphasis
>shift to the final syllable in the combined form?
/'di.os/ is not a Spanish word. I believe the explanation why the accent
shifted to the second syllable is precisely that the first syllable became
unsyllabic: /djos/, and this is the reason why the one-syllbic
interpretation of this word is preferred to the analysis /di.'(j)os/. In
very slow speech, you can of course seperate the word into two syllable,
just as you could do with English words like /mjuz/: [mi.'(j)u:z].

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

Reply