Re: Dropping Q and C (was: Some isolating verb patterns)

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> Yes, I knew that before front vowels |k| was 'softened' in the
> Scandinavian langs (Isn't it /tC/ in Danish) - that's one reason I said
> "almost invariably" and just plain "invariably".  But I was unsure whether,
>   for example, the Swedish /C/ was a distinct phoneme or an allophone of /k/
> . Does /k/ in fact ever occur before front vowels in the scandinavian
> langs.
Yup. There are, these days, a quite number of borrowings, incl extremely common
everyday words like _kille_ "boy", in which 'k'=[k] before a front vowel. It's
one of the broken things about modern Swedish orthography.

It's even worse with 'g', which before front vowels is variously [j], [g] and
[x]. In my 'lect you additionally get 'ge'=[S] in words like _garage_. (BP has
[x], and judging by phonemic accounts I've read that's probably the commoner
pronunciation, since they refer it to the 'sj' phoneme, which seems perverse as
far as my dialect is concerned.)

> And |q| is another of those pesky letters that are not really needed in
> the modern Roman alphabet, and it tends to be put to other uses in
> natlangs, for example: [q] (Innuit), [c] (Albanian), [?] (Maltese), [ts\_h]
>   (Pinyin), [!\] (Zulu and Xhosa) inter_alia. Even the |qu| combo is not
> the same everywhere: it may be /kw/, /kP/, /kv/ or just plain /k/.
Or even [ts\_hw] in Pinyin.

> In conlangs it is often used to denote [N], but I know of no natlang that
> does this.
I believe Fijian has 'q'=[Ng].

                                                   Andreas

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