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Re: Dublex/Katanda hybrid

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, May 18, 2002, 16:15
At 4:49 am -0400 17/5/02, Javier BF wrote:
>>Consonants and vowels are pronounced like their IPA equivalents >>unless indicated otherwise. They appear freely in the >>three basic morph types as shown except /q/ may not start >>a morpheme. In diphthongs, /i/ and /u/ become glides; vowel >>pairs such as /ae/ are rendered as two syllables with any >>glottal consonant. > >And why not as a "ae" diphthong, such as that of Latin?
But, conventionally at least, classical Latin {ae} is pronounced [aj] (unless adopting the later medieval [e]). In Welsh, e.g. /ae/ and /ai/ are pronounced differently, but anglophones certainly find it difficult to keep such a distinction. [snip]
> > >>An unwritten buffering schwa occurs >>between words that would otherwise yield a geminate > >I've always wondered why in English-language lists >there's kind of a general consensus about geminates >being "difficult". I don't think any Finnish or Italian >speaker would see anything difficult in them at all.
Ah - something I agree with Javier over! Count me out of the "general consensus". IMO it's merely anglophonic linguistic laziness. Not only does not Finn or Italian see anything difficult, this life-long English also sees nothing difficult. I quite like geminate consonants. It occurs to me that Spanish doesn't have them either. Do Spaniards have the same apparent aversion to them as English speakers? ------------------------------------------------------------------ At 9:25 am -0400 17/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Javier BF scripsit:
[snip]
>> And neither English speakers themselves seem to have >> problems with geminates when they remain unaware of >> being pronouncing them, such as in "night train" or >> "whole land", which don't sound the same as >> "night rain" and "whole and". > >Actually, this distinction is not one of gemination.
It certainly isn't.
>In "night train", >the /t/ is pronounced with aspiration, i.e. as an initial, and the >final /t/ remains only to the extent that it keeps the preceding diphthong >short (as opposed to "nigh train", where it is long). In "night rain", >the /t/ is pronounced as a final, i.e. typically with a glottal stop.
Almost always as a glottal stop by younger generations in Britain - and even old timers like me do not use the same sound for syllable final /t/ as the aspirated syllable initial [t_h]
> >As for "whole land" and "whole and", "and" is pronounced /@n/ unless >special stress is placed on it, so here again there is no real question >of phonetic or phonological gemination.
..and, of course, the syllable final "dark-l" is quite a different sound from the 'light-l' at the beginning of 'land' in practically all versions of English (I think the only exceptions occur in some Irish English dialects); the dark-l tends towards [w] and, in London and much of the south-east of England has actually become [w] in collquial speech. I think this sound change is known in some other Englishes (Oz??). Ray. ======================================================= The median nature of language is an epistemological commonplace. So is the fact that every general statement worth making about language invites a counter-statement or antithesis. GEORGE STEINER. =======================================================

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John Cowan <jcowan@...>