Re: OT: Jules (fi: syllables)

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
>
> > Actually, it's the contrary. The character Astérix was named after the
> > French name for the * symbol: "astérisque", just like Obélix has its name
> > from "obélisque". People don't usually make a mistake in the ending
> > (-isque
> > is quite a common French ending, -ix is definitely foreign).
>
> Is "obelisque" the common name in French for U+2020, the cross-shaped
> symbol that is usually called a "dagger" (but occasionally an "obelisk")
> in English?
>
> All /sk/ went to /S/ in English long ago, and then we borrowed a raft of
> words in /sk/- from Norse, but we still have trouble pronouncing /sk/
> finally:  hence /"&st@r\Ik/ ~ /"&st@r\Iks/ is very common, and
> many dialects have /&ks/ for "ask".  (But "risk" is not commonly changed.)
This is, incidentally, evidence that stops are not always
treated as being less sonorous than fricatives.  If they
were, we would expect a falling sonority contour towards
the end of a syllable to have no problem with /sk/ complex
codas.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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