Re: Different types of roots; temporary/permanent stative verbs?

Muke Tever scripsit:

> Well, I know a sort-of rule in English [probably not a rule so much as an
> accident probably] in that given an initial dental fricative, the voiced [D]
> only appears in pronouns (the, that, they...) and the voiceless [T] in all other
> parts of speech (thin, thigh, think...).
Actually [D] appears in all sorts of function words:  then, there.  "The" isn't
a pronoun either.

In general, [D] appears in intervocalic contexts, or contexts that were once
intervocalic, or at the beginning of function words.  It is essentially a
dead phoneme: when a new word spelled with "th" is added to the language,
it is almost always pronounced [T], and I find that people who aren't
conlangers have the greatest trouble saying a newly discovered word with [D]
in it -- they want to make it [T].

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter

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