Re: Elvish ideas ...

Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:

> 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.)
Swedish is alot harder on these ones - in my 'lect the corresponding words are
_kyrka_ [SYr`:ka], _hjärta_ [j{t`:a] and _stjärna_ [x{:n`a]. Beside "hj",
several other Cj clusters went >j; "dj", "gj", "lj". Initial Cj- is now pretty
much restricted to labial+j, plus a few odd words in nj-. And there's of
course spj-.

                                                                Andreas

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