Re: English syllable structure

Quoting And Rosta <a.rosta@...>:

> Kou:
> > /nIk@rA:gju@/ sounds distinctly British (BBC) to my ears. Too, the
> car
> > "Jaguar" pronounced à la britannique sounds like  /dZ&gju@/.
>
> In English English _Nicaragua_ and _jaguar_ rhyme in /&gju:@/.
> /nIk@'r&gw@/ or (god help us!) /nIk@'rA:gw@/ would sound insufferably
> pretentious. It seems to be symptomatic of the different ways that
> English and American English do Foreign. E.g. Eng E renders _pasta_
> and _costa_ as /p&st@/ and /kQst@/, as tho they were native E words,
> whereas Am E does them as /pAst@/ and /kowst@/, i.e. with Am E
> phonemes but Foreign phonotactics (alient for monomorphemic words).
How do the American pronunciations you cite have alien phonotactics?
"Costa" is distinguishable from "coaster" for me only from the final
vowel, where I have r-coloring for <-er>.  Because there is an enclitic
version of "of" in my dialect, which has no /v/, "pasta" can rhyme
in my dialect with "cost of" ("The cost of the food surprised me" =
[D@.kAs.t@.D@.fu:d.sr=.praI(zd.mi]).

> And although there is a partial phonological rationale for that
> dialect difference, it also seems to me that it is a further
> symptom of the tendency in matters of Learning and High Kulchur
> (to which domain Foreign belongs) for the English to be arrogantly
> insular and the Americans to be diffidently catechumenical.
Or it could just be that America has had more Italian and
Hispanic immigrant communities from which to pick up pronunciations
closer to the original.

My old professor at UT, Robert King, once told me a story about
a trip of his to London a few years back.  He was visiting with
some woman there and they were discussing about a place to eat.
She said: "Oh! There's this lovely new [t@.dZ&.n@u] restaurant
around the corner!" (or to that effect, with that pronunciation).
He said he shuddered inwardly, politely nodded and accepted her
invitation.

(The same, incidentally, applies to areas in the United States
without large immigrant communities from certain areas of the
world.  My friend Alfred, if he's reading this, can inform us
if he so chooses about the tendency of the good and great people
of St. Louis to pronounce "fajita" as [f@.dZai(.r"@].)

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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