From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Sun Sep 03 03:47:11 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14329 invoked from network); 3 Sep 2000 10:47:11 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 3 Sep 2000 10:47:11 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta3 with SMTP; 3 Sep 2000 10:47:09 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp9.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.9]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id OAA24096 for ; Sun, 3 Sep 2000 14:02:20 +0300 Message-ID: <39B20D5D.AE0DFEC7@math.bas.bg> Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 11:35:41 +0300 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: learning lojban [2] References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski John Cowan wrote: > On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > > > It still amazes my Slavic mind that the distinction between > > a monophthong and a falling diphthong should count as fine. > > Probably because English has no tense monophthongs, near enough. There is that, and more. When a word such as _ghetto_ appears, why does it get pronounced as ['getoU]? It's not (just) because _o_ occasionally stands for [oU] in native English words. It's (also) because of certain restrictions on the occurrence of the phoneme /o/ (which is a rounded vowel in part of the anglophone area). English (1) requires that certain vowels be `long'; and (2) makes `long' vowels be realised as falling diphthongs. So because of its position in the word, the vowel in _ghetto_ can't be /o/, it must be /o:/, which is pronounced [oU] (or [ow] as some would say). Ditto for /e/ becoming /e:/ [eI] (or [ej]). In effect, there is a tendency to close syllables. This is sort of similar to other languages' tendency or requirement to cover syllables, which gives /o/ an on-glide in Russian (making it sound as [Uo] or even [U@]) and prefixes a glottal stop to all initial vowels in Arabic and German; but it is much, much less common. Note that there are many languages that require syllable-initial consonants or ban syllable-final ones, but none the other way around; so a language that turns /o/ into /wo/ or /?o/ is doing something normal, whereas one that turns /o/ into /ow/ is doing something weird. An old (of the early '60s) article by V V Shevoroshkin relates the Germanic languages' preference for closed syllables to the fact that the world's most consonantal languages (close to the theoretical extreme) are of that branch. And extremes are always amazing. --Ivan