Re: Gzarondan: Phonological Review

From:    "Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon)" <dragon@...>
> "Thomas R. Wier" wrote, quoting myself:
> > >    * The inside of a syllable may contain any vowel or diphthong, or
> > >      else one of the following (known as the Lateral Series):
> > >     /Il/ /El/ /8:l/ /al/ /Ol/.
> >
> > /l/ here is presumably not a glide, but what then motivates it being
> > in the syllabic nucleus? Or am I misinterpreting you here?
>
> It's the simplest way to describe the syllable structure. [...]
> [8:5] is one of a number of structures that are treated by the
> phonology as rather like diphthongs [...] whereas [a:5] is not one
> of those, so you can't get [a:5] without setting the coda of the
> syllable as /l/, which rules out the possibility of [a:5n], whereas
> [8:5n] is fine because the coda is free to contain the /n/.
Okay, fine with me.  It all depends on the phonetics of it all.

> > >  * Stress gravitates toward syllables beginning with an approximant,
> > >   velar fricative, lateral or trill.
> >
> > Prosodic phonologists like Megan Crowhurst have told me that there
> > are no languages in which the onset has any role in syllabic weight;
> > only the coda has any such role.  However, what counts as a moraic
> > syllable
NB:  I should have said "moraic coda" here.

> > may depend on whether it's an approximant or nasal, etc.
> > So, if you just switch "beginning" to "ending", the tendency you describe
> > here will be very natural.  (Assuming you want naturalness, of course.)
>
> Really? This is something that feels very intuitive to me. Certain
> consonants are characteristically articulated with slightly more
> energy than others, which is absorbed by increasing the volume of the
> following vowel. It sounds wholly plausible and sensible.
Well, I'm not an expert on the phonetic principles underlying
phonological typology, but I think what you're describing here
really explains why so many languages prefer all syllables to
have onsets, rather than why/whether they are heavy.  Most of the
languages I studied with her did not make any distinction between
the heaviness of phonemically long vowels and syllables with codas
(Latin, e.g., treats them the same way). Acoustically this might
be because vowels with codas tend to be slightly relatively lengthened,
which also might explain why some classes of consonants make
syllables heavy while others do not.  But really we should be
asking Dirk this, as he is the local expert.

> But no languages at all follow my intuition and
> allow a consonant to influence the stress on the following vowel?
> That's ... rather shocking, really!
Yeah, some linguistic generalizations can be really counterintuitive.

> Anyway, thanks very much for commenting on my phonology. I appreciate
> it. Even if you end up criticising rules that I'm rather attached to. :-)
Well, since your system has underlying specification of stress anyways,
I wouldn't worry about it too much.  You could say that stress is actually
always synchronically unpredictable, and what tendencies there are result
from diachronic realities no longer operating, say, that internal vowels
were deleted and their stressing shifted to the following syllable rather
than the preceding one. (Still, this would be a marked condition, but...)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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