Re: USAGE: syllables

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> > Maximally, there are 7 or so sonority classes in any language, though some
> > languages may distinguish more. In order from least to most sonorous,
> > these are:
> >
> > 1) Stops
> > 2) Fricatives
> > 3) Nasals
> > 4) Liquids ([l], [r], and the like)
> > 5) High vocoids ([i],[u],[j],[w], etc.)
> > 6) Mid vocoids ([e],[o], etc.)
> > 7) Low vocoids ([a])
> (snip)
>
> A question: is the above sequence universal?  My subjective experience
> in producing the sounds would lead me to say that fricatives were
> more sonorous than nasals or liquids, and it's difficult to rank
> the latter two at all; they seem about equivalent.
Eh? If a fricative is more sonorous than a nasal, then [nfip] should be
easier to pronounce than [fnip], which is false to me. Likewise, is [rma]
easier than [mra]? In any case, the cross-linguistic evidence is strongly
in favor of the above ranking being the universal unmarked case.
Individual exceptions apply, like English speakers who can say [sta] but
not [tsa].

> > I recently discovered that Old Yivrian is best described with three sonority
> > classes:
>
> The grouping of [l] with stops rather than with [r]/[w] does seem odd.
> But what is Old Yivrian?  I've not heard of it.
The ancestor of Yivrian, my main conlang. The grouping of [l] with the
stops is indeed odd, and provides support for the "Obstruent L" theory
that I've bandied about sporadically. Basically, when it comes to syllable
structure, /l/ consistently seems to pattern with the stops and not the
liquids, almost all the way into Modern Yivrian. Thus, the Obstruent L
hypothesis suggests that /l/ was articulatorily a stop at some point in
the past. I don't know what it was, though, since all of the related
languages that I know of have *l reflexed as plain ol' /l/.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

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