6.1236, Disc: Palatal Glides, Re: Summary, Vol-6-1221

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-1236. Tue Sep 12 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  61
 
Subject: 6.1236, Disc: Palatal Glides, Re: Summary, Vol-6-1221
 
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1)
Date:  Sat, 09 Sep 1995 20:35:32 -0800
From:  edwin at unixg.ubc.ca
Subject:   Palatal glides
 
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1)
Date:  Sat, 09 Sep 1995 20:35:32 -0800
From:  edwin at unixg.ubc.ca
Subject:   Palatal glides
 
I am responding to the SUMMARY on the above subject on LINGUIST List:
Vol-6-1221. Fri Sep 8 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875, which was passed on to me as
the author of the reconstruction of Middle Chinese in question, illustrated
by the four syllables:
 
                 kan     kjan    kian    kjian
 
The first point that needs to be made is that the second term should read:
kjaan, that is, with a long vowel.  Nuclei in the language in question were
either short, as in the case of kan, k at n, (where @ stands for schwa), kin,
kun, kyn (where y has its IPA value as a front-rounded vowel), or long, as
in the case of kjaan, kwaan, sraan (retroflex s!), and also of syllables
containing the VV diphthongs -ia-, -ua-, -ya-, the first elements of which
were syllabic vowels, not glides. Such diphthongs are found, for example,
in Vietnamese. They are also found in r-dropping dialects of English that
treat words like 'dear, beard, cure, etc' as monosyllables. It is claimed
that in Middle Chinese the glide j- could occur distinctively before the
vowel -i both when it was a nuclear vowel and when it was the first element
in a VV diphthong, but this should not be surprising to speakers of English
who distinguish the words 'ear' and 'year'.  The only difference is that
English does not allow initial clusters of Cj- before [i].
 
So there are not three different types of palatal on-glide, only one.
 
For Vietnamese parallels I recommend the excellent account by the late and
much regretted British phonetician, Eugenie Henderson, 'Towards a prosodic
statement of Vietnamese syllable structure' in In Memory of J. R. Firth,
edited by C. E. Bazell, et al., London: Longman's (1966).
 
Edwin (Ted) Pulleyblank
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