Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!
| From: | Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 26, 2006, 20:58 |
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On 3/26/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> it's difficult for me to make a distinction
> between words with and without an initial glottal stop. The tendency is
> to add a glottal stop before an initial vowel.
Ah yes, same here. (I believe German has a near-obligatory glottal
stop before word-initial -- possibly even morpheme-initial -- vowels,
so I have the same tendency.)
Makes me glad I haven't tried to learn Tongan in earnest, though I was
very interested in its close relative Niuean for a while. (Fortunately
for me, Niuean has no glottal stops, so minimal pairs such as {tau}
and {ta'u} collapse to {tau}. -- Niuean has three words {tau} meaning
"(plural marker)", "year", and "fight"; unfortunately, I don't
remember which Tongan word means which.)
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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