[Lexicog] new nosey word

[Mali Translation]

>From Fritz to Jan and Preslav

I can't see either how one cannot pronounce a vowel
(at least a shwa) somewhere in a string of consonants:

German: Strumpf
        pfropft
        Knirps
        trumpft

The problem is to what we are used. As a German
I have no problem pronouncing a string -mpft- but
it would probably take some time for me to correctly
pronounce and get used to the kind of Czech strings
of consonants Jan Ulrich mentioned.
He said "In Czech, my native language, probably the
longest word without vowels is “scvrnkls”. It means
something like “you pushed it away with your finger”.
This leads me to a question which lets the discussion
get back more to lexicology and meaning: When you come
to the end of a line, where do you separate such a
multiconsonant word which seems to stand for a sentence?
(The above German examples are monosyllables standing for
just a verb or a noun, and they would not be separated.
One could add a plural ending to the nouns and a temporal
suffix to the verbs which would allow theoretically to
make a break inside the word at the end of a line. For
these breaks there are rules which do not concern us here).
So in your, Jan's example or other similar cases where
would you break at the end of a line to make grammatical
and semantic sense? It is possible that one would not
break at all because a break would not make sense.
It is also possible that the likelihood of such a rare
word occurring at the end of a line is very low. But I
ask that question as a matter of principle having a
theoretical and practical interest, and also to see how
Czech works in this case. A break-down of "scvrnkls" to
the moneme level would help me understand, like does
"scv" mean "you pushed it away" and "r" = "with" and
"nkls" = "your finger"? (Probably you get a good laugh
out of this).

>From my experience in Bible translation up to the
point of publication, I can say that one has to master
word composition rules in the receptor language.
Sometimes at the typesetting stage typesetters introduce
unwanted word breaks which have to be caught be a careful
rereading of the whole document.

Frtz, I mean Fritz


On 10/04/2004 17:59, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Preslav Ivanov Nakov wrote:
>
> > How can one pronounce a word like "vlk"?
> > I see no way without putting a vowel somewhere. There are two options:
> >
> > v'lk
> > vl'k
> >
> > where ' stands for the place the vowel is put. Try "valk" and "vlak"
> to see
> > which one sounds closer to the pronunciation. That way you know
> where the
> > vowel appears.
>
> I don't know enough about Czech or Serbian to elucidate the detailed
> phonetics of either, but this is an old argument in linguistics.  I
> believe I can manage vlk, v<schwa>lk, and vl<schwa>k distinctively,
> without knowing if I approximate Czech in any case.  There are basicly two
> levels at which this argument can be fought - the phonetic and the
> phonological.  At the phonetic level it appears that any sound that is
> extendible can be the peak of sonority of a syllable, e.g., the range of r
> and l sounds, nasal "stops", fricatives, and stop releases.
>
>



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