Etcetera

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:56 PM -0500 7/30/03, Herbert Stahlke wrote:
>I suspect it's simply a phonotactic adjustment of the sort that speakers not
>driven by etymology make.  English has very few iambic words with /ts/ after
>the first vowel.  I can't think of any immediately, and Valeda Blockcolsky's
>40,000 Selected Words: Organized by Letter, Sound, Syllable doesn't give any
>either.  Plenty of trochees but no iambs.  So we change the /t/ to a /k/
>because we have plenty of /Vks-/ or /Vgz-/ iambs.  This strikes me as
>similar to the pronunciation /'nukj at l@r/ for /nu'klj at r/, since there are so
>few /-klj at r] forms but plenty with /-kj at l@r/.  We reorganize the
>phonotactics to our expectations.
>
>Herb Stahlke

And in particular we have "except", which is sort of in the same
semantic field, although a preposition.  And "exactly", although
there the affricate is voiced.   I'm not sure whether the metrics are
more or less of a consideration than the grammatical and semantic
considerations, but perhaps the two factors reinforce each other.
(As they do with "nuclear", given all those -cular adjectives.)

Larry,
who makes sure he always uses a [ts] lest his old high school Latin
teacher roll over in his grave