Irish ambisyllabicity (fwd)

[Andrew Carnie]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:13:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Nicholas Kibre <nick at STL.Research.Panasonic.COM>
To: The Celtic Linguistics List <CELTLING at mitvma.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Irish ambisyllabicity (fwd)


> I'm wondering if anyone else on this list has given any thought to
> ambisyllabicity in Irish. A native speaker has informed me that her
> intuition says that a single consonant after a short stressed vowel is
> amibsyllabic (which I mark <>), e.g. glana 'clean (pl.)' [gla<n>@]. After a
> long vowel, though there is no amibsyllabicity, e.g. ba/na 'white (pl.)'
> [ba:.n@] (. = clean syllable boundary).  In obstruent+sonorant and
> sonorant+obstruent clusters after a short stressed vowel, the obstruent is
> ambisyllabic, e.g. ocras 'hunger' [o<k>r at s]; olcas 'evil' [ol<k>@s].
>
This is admittedly a doozie. My initial though is that this must have to
do with some kind of desire for stressed syllables to be heavy.  The real
puzzler is why long vowels count as already being heavy when
vowel+sonorant rhymes don't.

Well, here's one idea. Does Irish allow long vowels before clusters? If
it doesn't, there might be a solution something like this: There's a
generalization (a rule, a constraint, whatever) that consonants should be
doubled after stressed vowels, but it is over-ridden if the preceding
vowel is long so as to avoid having to obscure the underlying voicing
contrast.

On the other hand, maybe there's some tricky way you can arange it to
differentiate between V: and V+sonorant.

Well, I'm just a Brythonicist, so I'm probably in over my head. Anyway,
good luck!

Nick

 ---------o---  Nicholas Kibre /'nihkahlahs 'kayber/
         /      Research Linguist/Speech Programmer
        /       Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory
 __=========__  805 687 0110 xt 230
 | |_|_|_|_| |  nick at stl.research.panasonic.com
 |_|_______|_|
 --o=o---o=o--  http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/depts/linguistics/grads.html#kibre