Re: Two questions about Esperanto

On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 09:22 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 08:53:23PM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
> > > No, they're not. AFAIK Esperanto alone puts circumflex accents on
> > > consonants.
>
> > I think there are a few cases where other languages use circumflexes on
> > letters we traditionally think of as "consonants" but which can be
> > syllabic in that language . . . e.g. <r>.
>
> But syllabic |r| is not a consonant.
What does syllabicity have to do with a phone being consonantal or
not?  In most phonological features systems of which I am aware,
[+- consonantal] (or to put it differently, [+- vocalic]) and
[+- syllabic] are two separate features.

> If a language uses the circumflex in
> something like its original use, i.e. to denote high pitch falling to low
> pitch on the same vowel, and it has /r/ as syllable nucleus, then of
> course we'd expect the circumflex to fall on |r| sometimes. But I was
> talking about true consonants. AFAIK Esperanto is the only language that
> pits circumflexes on true consonants.
Can't think of a really clear example off the top of my head, but
I know that in his discussion about Hurrian-Urartian and its putative
relationship to North-East Caucasian, I. Diakonoff uses circumflexes
on <s> to signify a lateral fricative (truly one of the worst transcription
systems ever!).  Since Hurrian used cuneiform, and Urartian used either
cuneiform or an abjad, and none of the NE-Cauc. languages uses the Latin
alphabet, I'm not sure this counts.  (On the other hand, most NE-Cauc
languages are not written languages, and more Hurrian and Urartian
nowadays are written in the Latin alphabet than in any of their
original ones, so maybe it does count!)

 =========================================================================
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