Re: Why Consonants?

On 17/02/07, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
...
> There are lots of Australian Aboriginal languages with VC syllable
> structure.
This is subject to debate, and what I've seen of them (transmitted to
me by someone sceptical of the theory) is that word-initial vowels and
consonants generally are optional, so that a word like CVVCV is
perfectly well-formed, and I don't understand why you'd want to
syllabify it as C.V.VC.V. But I don't know anything more about it that
that...

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On 17/02/07, Aquamarine Demon <aquamarine_demon@...> wrote:
>For one, vowels define syllables, while
> consonants never do. In other words, when you're counting the number of
> syllables in a word, you're counting the vowels, not the consonants.
Well, that kinda begs the question. Languages like American English or
Croatian allow various segments more usually considered as consonants
to be vowels. Of course, as a consequence one then (quite reasonably)
says that in American English, /r\=/ is a vowel. But then all we've
done is defined vowels as things which form the nucleus of syllables,
so of *course* vowels define syllables, and consonants don't. (Otoh,
in a strict CV language, one could quite easily say that the consonant
defines the syllable anyway, particularly if vowels can be long or
diphthong.)

There's also the concept of "vocoids" and "contoids" which allow for a
less circular definition, but I'm pretty sure [l, r\] (and all
approximants) are classified as "vocoids" in that system, yet they're
usually *not* nuclei.

--
Tristan.

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