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From: rharmsen@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen)
Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
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Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 20:54:15 GMT
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In article <D2Ctqt.K3M@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>Cf. "a not-too-sharp brake widh dha past"; if you meant to use "th" for 
>unvoiced /T/, that should have been "with dha past".

>>But you are right that these two sounds, though clearly distinguished by all 
>>speakers, are most probably just one phoneme. I set up rules to predict the 
>>sound (a number of years ago, when I didn't have a computer yet, and I don't 
>>know where I kept the piece of paper), and it CAN be done with almost no 
>>exceptions. But you need not only surrounding phonemes for these rules, but 
>>also grammatical categories (e.g. the, that, this, they, vs. think. There are 
>>no _verbs_ that have an initial dh sound, etc.).

>Right: initial unvoiced th appears only content words.  Does any historical
>linguist here have an explanation for this?

I don't, but I'm not a historical linguist, not even a linguist. But I 
have found my old notes, and will post them in a new thread entitled 
"Th - one or two phonemes in English?"
