Re: Elvish ideas ...

Andreas wrote:

>But there's no law of nature saying that [sj] must necessarily >[S].
In Danish, there are a lot of  cases of, Cj --> C .  It's not universal,
and I don't know what the precise environment for the loss is.  In certain
cases, the consonant is lost instead or nothing is lost.

some examples:
(sorry, I'm quite new to trying to do transcriptions without IPA or some
equivalent system available, so I'm not even going to try to transcribe the
words.)

The older form of "church" was kjerke (still preserved in personal names),
but the current form is kirke.

If you look through H.C. Andersen's fairy tales, where the 19th century
orthography is still retained in today's printed editions, you will find a
lot of Cj clusters that are no longer present in the revised
orthography.  What you find in modern orthography is a simply a C.  The jod
has dropped out entirely.

But hjerte "heart" pronounced with a simple jod at the beginning.  Any word
beginning with an hj is pronouced this way, so this is an example of hj --> j.

But stjerne "star" is pronounced just the way it is spelled.  (I suspect
that the difference may be that j --> 0 in #Cj clusters, but not in #CCj
clusters, but I can't be sure of that since I haven't really analysed the
data at this point.)

Isidora

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