Syllabic consonants

[Herb Stahlke]

Unfortunately, I don't think phonetic reality is persuasive here.  He
seems to be interested only in how he can devise a spelling system for
English that abides roughly by some ill-defined alphabetic principle
and uses only the 26 lower case letters of the standard American
typewriter keyboard.

Herb

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Syllabic consonants
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Direct him to the languages of the Salish group here--syllabic
> fricatives galore--and we all have them in our own English allegro
> speech.
>
> Paul Johnston
> On Feb 28, 2009, at 4:50 PM, Geoffrey Nathan wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Syllabic consonants
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------
>>
>> I will break my vow here not to enter into discussions with Mr. Z,
>> but his comment
>>
>>> Syllabic "l" is not a good concept. A syllable needs a vowel.
>>> Also if you add a suffix you might need that vowel.
>>> For instand cannibalize. It's not pronounced cannablize.
>>> But a "syllabic l" would wipe out the vowel that is necessary
>>> there. Syllabic l is bad concept that is worthless.
>>
>> is insulting to Czech speakers living in Brno (syllabic trilled
>> rhotic) and those who speak Srpski (Serbian), not to mention those
>> who live in Plzen (syllabic lateral approximant) or drink the
>> 'Plsner' that comes from there.  Not to mention all American
>> English speakers who have syllabic [n]'s in 'button' [bV?n,]
>> (V=caret; ,=syllabic marker under n).  Then there's Tamazight
>> Berber with syllabic f's and even t's:         /tf`tk`ts`tt/   `you
>> sprained it' (http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/TPS.html).
>> And, of course, there is a contrast between syllabic [l,] and non-
>> syllabic [l] in cases such as the famous pair 'coddling' (treating
>> with kid gloves) and 'codling' (baby cod).  M-W, for example,
>> illustrates this contrast (and no, I'm not making a substantive
>> claim about the phonemes of English here--I suspect there's
>> actually an underlying schwa there, but as with all sonorants, the
>> coda spreads into the nucleus in unstressed syllables.)
>>
>> Geoff
>>
>>
>>
>> Geoffrey S. Nathan
>> Faculty Liaison, C&IT
>> and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
>> +1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
>> +1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org