Re: Juggling Consonants and Vowels

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Vima Kadphises wrote:

>      This reminds me a little of the "Name Game," which I have
always loathed for obvious reasons.  For those of you who have
not been thus tormented, it goes something like this, in its
simplest form:
>      you take a name like "Barry" - and the song comes out like
> "Barry Barry bo barry, banana fana fo farry, me my mo marry, Barry!"
>      or "Glen" and you have
> "Glen Glen bo blen, banana fana fo flen, me my mo mlen, Glen!"
This is actually subject to "dialect" variation. The most common
form of the Name Game (and the one heard in the song) replaces
the entire onset. Thus:

        Glen, Glen, bo ben,
        banana fana fo fen,
        me my mo men,
        Glen!

Another "dialect" replaces complex onsets except for those
formed with glides (Gwen, Kyoko, Beula): [*]

        Kyoko, Kyoko, bo byoko,
        banana fana fo fyoko,
        me my mo myoko,
        Kyoko!

There is a squib by Mike Hammond in the 1990 volume of the
journal _Phonology_ which makes use of this data to argue a
rather technical point about prosodic theory.

[*] Actually, [gw] clusters (as in Gwen) behave differently from
clusters with [y]; Hammond and Davis (1994) deal with this
asymmetry in an another article in _Phonology_. The idea is that
[y] really belongs in the nucleus, while [w] really is a
consonant in the onset.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu