syllabic consonants

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

 >(Rood)
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  In the unpublished intro to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 in the Journal
of African Linguistics and the Journal of Afroasiatic Languages in 1985,
1988, and 1989.<<


As for plosives (different from liquids or sibilants etc., not having a
certain duration), they're much harder to produce together (i.e. at the
very same time) with the accompaning sound of the vocal chords.

In Chinese (Putonghua), there are many words consisting of syllabic
consonants, e.g. /s/ and /sh/ (usually written differently according to
the system of romanization respective: pinyin si or shi, W-G szu or
shih, Gwoyeu romatzyh syh or shyy etc.) Two of many more: si4 - four,
si3 - to die etc.

For whomever interested: I once have put together a whole story in
Chinese, composed entirely of one and (almost) the same
monosyllabic-consonant word: if written in a romanized form or spoken,
it's Putonghua version is totally incomprehensible.

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML
http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/AUSAMP.RXML


Alfred