syllabic consonants

[ROOD DAVID S]

Hi, everyone --

I haven't been following this discussion very well, but the concept of
syllabic consonants caught my eye.  In the unpublished intro to optimality
theory by Prince and Smolensky (partly published in "Optimality Theory in
Phonology; A REader" ed. by John McCarthy, Blackwell, 2004), they discuss
(pp. 7ff in the McCarthy book) a dialect of Berber which allows any
consonant whatsoever to be the peak of a syllable.  They cite words
like"bddl" and "tftkt".  Their references are to several papers by Francois
Dell and Mohamed Elmedlaoui int he Journal of African Linguistics and the
Journal of Afroasiatic Languages in 1985, 1988, and 1989.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
[mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of Alfred W. Tüting
Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2004 12:44 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: [Lexicog] new nosey word


 >Yes, it is true. Some of our consonants are so called
"syllable-forming", r, l, m; practically their ability to stand in
for a wovel is related to the possibility to hold a length (like
rrrrrrr and llll, while in other consonants this is not possible
(b, p, k, t etc.) These then cannot be syllable forming.
I had an interesting conversation a while ago with a Czech man in
New mexico who brought to my attention close linguistic ties
between the Basque language and Czech. Amazing.
Hope you are well,
Jiri<<

 > In Czech, my native language, probably the longest word without vowels is
?scvrnkls?. It means something like ?you pushed it away with you
finger?. I think most of the Czech vowel-less words usually have about
three to five consonants, but quite frequently they can be combined into
sentences,
similar to the famous Czech tongue twister:

Strc prst skrz krk. (Stick your finger through your throat.)

In such Czech words it is indeed ?r? and ?l? that are
phonetically
vowel-like.
Jan Ullrich <<


Yes, the "Strc (stick) prst (finger) skrz (through) krk (throat)!"
sentence is a really famous one - and (although I'm not very familiar
with Czech) I'm proud to be able to pronounce this sentence since my
childhood ;-)
Here (and in other samples), the R actually seems to have vowel quality
(sometimes also  L can have, e.g. in Bavarian or, say, Viennese dialect).

Just one consideration:
In Serbo-Croatian (that I do not speak) there's a word 'trg' (about:
market) and in Romanian (that I'm familiar with) there's a word with the
same meaning, spelled 'tîrg' or (now again) 'târg' (e.g. the toponym
Târgu-Mures/Maros Vásárhely) which is pronounced with a 'darkened' vowel
and - as I feel - quite similar to the 'vowelless' slavic version! So,
is it only depending from what angle one is looking at it to decide
whether the R is bearing the vowel or not???


Alfred