Re: THEORY: derivation question

Lassailly@aol.com wrote: "Also Khmer tends to pronounce all final
consonants as glottal stop. I've often imagined that these consonants would
quickly disappear if it weren't for their being piously preserved in
writings. I've read that Tibetan initial consonants are often not
pronounced (?)."

All dialects of Tibetan have elided some or all of the consonants still
written in Classical Tibetan. Lhasa is the worst, changing words written
slab to /la/. Essentially, all prefixes are lost, although they may
influence the tone of the word, and all finals are lost. A word spelled
"drag" now sounds like the Mandarin word zha (but with an even, low tone
unlike Mandarin's third 'creaky' tone), ie. with a unaspirated, retroflexed
affricate /c/ in place of DR and the final g is lost completely. Final -s
and -l umlaut Os and As. Odd stuff, that, fun to learn but a real monster
to spell. Retroflexed c = "cr": /cri/ could be spelled bsgrigs!

BB
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