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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Question: Vowelless word
In-Reply-To: Bruce McMenomy's message of 16 Mar 1995 23:56:42 GMT
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In article <3kaj7q$jdt@news.halcyon.com> Bruce McMenomy <mcmenomy@halcyon.com>
writes:

>(Some of the early Indo-European languages rely on vocalic m and n, r and, I
>think, l.  These are all in the category of nasals/liquids, which have their
>own peculiar quasi-vocalic status.

I touched on this in another thread.

The resonants in PIE, *y *w *r *l *m *n, form a natural class, patterning alike
in morphophonological contexts.  In addition, they often share developments in
the daughter families, although because of the more highly vocalic nature of *i
and *u, these are often treated separately.

Rather than thinking of sounds as "consonantal" or "vocalic" in a binary system
(as, for example, in Chomsky & Halle or Jakobson, Fant, & Halle), we find that
we are frequently better served by the notion of a sonority hierarchy, with
sonority decreasing as one moves from vowels to obstruents:

	vowel > glide > liquid > nasal > fricative > stop

An English word that exhibits this hierarchy is "iron" (for which I know two
pronunciations):

	[Ajrn]	monosyllabic
	[Aj.rn]	disyllabic (my native pronunciation)

Note that transposing any pair of resonants in the monosyllabic pronunciation
*guarantees* a disyllable in English.
-- 
Rich Alderson		[Tolkien quote temporarily removed in favour of
alderson@netcom.com	 proselytizing comment below --rma]

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