accusative cursing

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:59 PM -0400 4/12/07, James C Stalker wrote:
>Ok.  So I guess 58,700 "nekid" hits loses.  Not only do I have
>unconventional English pronunciation, I have unconvetional spelling of
>unconventional English.  Google prompted me with "do you mean nekkid?"
>Google and Larry are on the right side.
>
>I had not thought through my original question, which I now think is more
>complex.  Why do we have a particular alternate spelling for a given spelled
>word?  We have "nekkid" and "nekid."  LH suggests that we need the double K
>to indicate the higher mid front tense glided vowel, and that single K
>indicates the lower lax nonglided mid front vowel.  I'm not sure about that.
>We can look at doublets, which is what started all of this: beckon/bacon
>(with the interesting twist that Patty Loveless sings "beckoning" as
>"baconing"); trek/track, trekking/tracking; tech/tek.  A small body of data,
>but a set that suggests that K does not determine the preceding vowel.

I don't see any inconsistency here, and I wasn't suggesting what you
say I was suggesting.  -ck- and -kk- are two different ways to
suggest that the preceding vowel is lax; a single consonant in the
same frame would indicate that that vowel is tense.  Both [E] (as in
"trek") and [ae] (as in "track") are lax vowels, but differing in
quality.  I wouldn't describe the vowel of the former (or of
"nekkid") as "higher mid front tense glided"; for me, at least, it's
lax and unglided.  It's the [e(y)] of (standard) _naked_ that's tense
and off-glided.  Maybe we're using different terminology.

LH

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