Re: sabyuka : consonants, orthography, and a few things more

At 8:46 am +0200 23/5/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
>
>I kind of find it strange to use an accented letter to mark the schwa.
Strange or not, there are natlangs that do just that, e.g.
e-trema - Albanian
e-breve - Malay
a-brever - Romanian

I suspect there may be a few others.

> The
>schwa is to me the quintessence of the unstressed letter, and marking it with
>an accented letter is to me contradictory with its very nature.
There are natlangs where shwa is stessed, e.g. Welsh _ysgol_ /'@sgOl/
where /g/ is unaspirated voiceless plosive as opposed to /k/ which is
always aspirated and written {c}.

We southern Saxons tend to substitute our /V/ for this; but in AngloWelsh
as, apparently in many American dialects (this has been discussed
ad_nauseam on this list more than once before), our the /V/ and /@/ of
southern England have fallen together and are no longer separate phonemes.

Thus those dialects of English have stressed shwa and I know there are
examples from other natlangs, but I'm tired at then end of a very tiresome
week (And will probably know how the paper-work surrounding examinations
has increased out of all imaginable proportions - as indeed have the number
of examinations the educational establishment now imposes upon youngsters
between from about 16 to 18 - you'd be hard put to come up with a con-world
have as crazy as the 'real' word!) - so I'll it others   :)

Ray.


=======================================================
Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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