Eyjafjallajokull from an icelander

[Herb Stahlke]

Victor,

/tl/ does not occur in syllable-initial position in English, but it
does, as you show, occur across syllable boundaries in British
English.  However, these sequences are not what Icelandic has, where
the /t/ is released on the side of the tongue rather than at the
front, hence a "laterally released /t/."  In languages that have this
sound it typically counts as a single consonant, not a cluster or a
sequence.

Herb

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Eyjafjallajokull from an icelander
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Without suggesting error, I would like an explanation of bottle,
> throttle, mettle, cattle, settle, kettle, little, mantle, subtle and
> boot-licker, antler, ant-lion--and, for good measure, metal, petal,
> portal. US might be closer to [d] in most of these (not boot-licker,
> antler, ant-lion or mantle, and no US variant for little, for some
> reason), but OED says [t] for British. And mantle, little and subtle
> have both schwa and non-schwa variants.
>
>     VS-)
>
> On 4/22/2010 11:48 AM, Geoffrey Nathan wrote:
>> ... Since the combination of t-l is impossible in English, native speakers find it hard to deal with, especially at the beginning or ending of a word.
>
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