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Re: Rare phonemes (was Re: Using word generators)

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 16, 2007, 10:31
On 1/15/07, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> Philip Newton wrote: > > Phonemically, I'd be inclined to analyse it as /lU.tS@n/. > > That would imply that [tS] is a unit phoneme, call it /c-caron/. But doesn't > Germ. /S/ usually derive from *-sk- or *-sj-? that would imply that [tS] is > (or originally was) a cluster, thus the syllable division would be > [lUt.S@n].
You may be right. I also don't know what the correct hyphenation would be. (Hyphenation in German usually follows morphological rules -- which means that to hyphenate everything correctly, one needs to know about the morphology of languages such as Greek and Latin! The average German would be unlikely to hyphenate Lin-ole-um "correctly", but would probably produce something like Li-no-le-um instead.)
> Is the vowel in such cases short/lax (implying /-VCC(V)-/ or can > it be long/tense /-VC(V)-/?
It can be long, though I have difficulty coming up with examples. The first that came to my mind is "sutsche" with /u:/, which is northern German dialect, most probably from Plattdeutsch, but then I thought of "latschen" (to walk in a certain way) and "Latschen" (colloquial term for shoes) which have /a:/. I think "Grätsche" also has /E:/ rather than /E/. Oh, and "Bratsche" (viola) has /a:/ as well, though that's almost certainly a loanword (it looks suspiciously like a Romance word for "arm" to me). Most other examples I can think of have short vowels, though (e.g. lutschen, Putsch, rutschen, patschen, futsch, Matsch).
> Your writing "/U/" suggests the former; ergo, the first syl. is closed > /lut-/.
Possibly! Maybe it's even /lUt.tSn=/ (or [lU?.tSn=]?) .... Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>