Re: English syllable structure

Fabian wrote:

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Roger Mills" <romilly@...>
>
>> Then too you have to decide how inclusive to be:  natively, /S/ only
>> precedes /r/, but if you include germanisms and yiddishisms it occurs
>more
>> widely, 'spiel, schlemiehl, schmuck etc'.  /labial-w.../ occurs only in
>the
>> loan 'bwana'; /Cj.../ only if followed by /uw/, except for 'piano' and
>> 'chiaroscuro'etc. etc. But certain things are totally no-no, of course.
>
>My normal pronunciation os stupid is /StSu:pId/. Nix one theory.
Not nix IMO.  You are presumably in the dialect group that permits [ju]
after alveolars, as in tune [tjun], vs. (much of US) [tun].  [tj] may easily
become [tS], so that I submit your [stSu:pId] is underlying phonemic
[stju:pId].

As for
>labial W, consider teh consonant cluster written QU. Any number of words
>have that labial W with almost any following vowel. And then there's words
>such as tweak and twit, so nix two theory.
Sorry-- my writing "/labial-w/" was to avoid using the plus sign, which
often gets garbled in transmission.  I meant "labial plus w",  and aside
from the various foreign words cited, and similar others (like un-adapted
French words, moi, foie gras)-- there is no _English_ "labial plus w"--
*/pw.../ */bw.../, */fw.../ */vw.../ */mw.../ *****/ww..../.  Alveolar plus
w is OK, tweak, dwell, thwart, swell (nw...?  Dw...? not so sure);  and
velar plus w is OK, at least kw...;  likely gw... only in foreign words.
There is no alveo-palatal plus w:  *tSw....,  *dZw....;  /Sw.../ does occur,
but is marginal (schwa, personal names like Schweppes, Schwab).

And speaking of /g/-- in final position, there seem to be a lot of gaps, if
not systematic constraints:  league /..ig/, big /..Ig/,  ?/..eg/  beg /..Eg/
tug /Vg/, bag /&g/  ?/..ug/  ?/..Ug/  vogue /..og/ rare?,  log /Qg/  bog
US/Ag/  UK /Og/?.  Even more constraints on final /N/, as Dirk Elzinga
pointed out.

The problem is, do the few oddities that violate the general rule justify
saying that the general rule is _too_ general?  And the related problem,
when do originally foreign words become "English" words?

Reverting to pw...-- I've heard "pueblo" pronounced [pju'Eblo]; and some BBC
newsreaders pronounce "Nicaragua" as [nIk@'ra_gju_a], which is non-US and
certainly non-Spanish.

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