Pronouncing -gn-

[Alina Israeli]

>>[The effects of native speaker
>>consciousness are so pervasive, that my professor of linguistics/phonetics
>>at a rather known American university some 25 year ago was telling us that
>>the reduction of kn->n, pn ->n and gn->n is a linguistic universal,
>
>Alina, do you mean that he was a native speaker of English and claimed the
>reduction was true of English? and universalized it to other languages??
>Because it isn't even true of English ...
>(ignorant, magnanimous, igneous, acknowledge, etc.)

No, that genious in our alma mater, but in the linguistics dept (!),
claimed it a universal in the word initial position (cf. kniga, pneu,
knabe, gnus' etc.).

__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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