Re: Interjections

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 07:26:11AM -0500, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> Interjections may often follow the basic phonology of their languages, but
> there are many samples of conventional interjections that go beyond it.
True.

> English, for instance, may have /?/ in several interjections, even though
> this sound is alien to the English phonology (e.g. in the negation
> interjection ['?@?@], or even ['?m)m_^?m)m_^],
The sound /?/ may not exist as a phoneme in English, but it is certainly
not alien to English phonology.  It shows up even outside of the
dialects where it's an allophone for intervocalic /t/, usually to make a
prevocalic boundary evident (English doesn't universally
insert a [?] before initial vowels the way German does).  For instance,
the phrase "an ocean" is usually [@n'?owSn=] in my 'lect, vs "a notion"
which lacks the [?].

But yeah, it is more common in interjections; the common  "uh-oh!" (the
first word my 1-year-old son has used correctly) is ['?V?,?ow] for me.

-Marcos