Re: Country names

Tristan McLeay scripsit:

> But be glad I don't come Queensland. There, the evening begins at noon
This was traditionally true in the Southern U.S. also; Confederate
influence on Qld dialect, maybe?

> (I don't know of
> any word with unvoiced <zz> or <v>, but do know of at least 'dessert')
Wijk says that the only words with "ss" that are regularly pronounced
voiced (at least in RP and GA, the dialects he considers) are dessert,
dissolve, hussar (which surprised me), possess, scissors, and sometimes
hussy (which also surprised me).  Regularly unvoiced v does not occur
according to him, and as for zz, it appears only in a few oddball words
like jazz, fizz, buzz, dazzle, sizzle (excluding of course automatic
doubling as in quizzing).  Single z is unvoiced only after t, as in waltz,
chintz, ersatz, and quartz.

> Hence also pointing out the -th- in metho<methylated spirits
> wasn't voiced.
/D/ is a dead phoneme in English, and new words essentially never use it.
It appears only intervocalically from the general voicing of intervocalic
fricatives, finally where a final -e has been lost (breathe, e.g.), and
initially in inherited structure words (the, them, their, those, etc. etc.)

> If I was after words that were part of WSE, I would've chosen 'dessert',
> and 'carve'; I can't think of one with -zz- of the top of my head.
You devoice the v in carve, making it [ka:f]?

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
"The exception proves the rule."  Dimbulbs think: "Your counterexample proves
my theory."  Latin students think "'Probat' means 'tests': the exception puts
the rule to the proof."  But legal historians know it means "Evidence for an
exception is evidence of the existence of a rule in cases not excepted from."

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