From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17398
Date: 2003-01-04
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2003 11:46 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Laryngeal Loss (was Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?)
> Do the heavy initial
> clusters of Polish include
> (predictable) silent vowels? The
> notion is inspired by some remarks
> in Piotr's paper on presigmatised
> plosives.
They are analysed as involving silent vowels by proponents of Government Phonology -- but this is that school's routine treatment of funny clusters in _any_ language. Anyway, it's an abstract phonological analysis. There are no surface vowels there, and the native speaker's judgement is that words like <mdlec'> 'faint', <rdest> 'knotweed' or <krtan'> 'larynx' are monosyllabic (they also function as such in poetry).
Piotr