Re: Clusters

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com,
> Piotr Gasiorowski
> <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> >
> > ----- 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
> :
> Whereas I am certain that /ptklli/
> is polysyllabic. Perhaps the vowels
> are better described as zero-length
> than silent. - Richard.

Are you completely certain /ptklli/ doesn't appear as a monosyllabic
somewhere in English poetry? ;-)

Sometime in the past, I found there was a similarity between the hard
and soft sign that I know from Russian which goes back to actual
short vowels in Proto-Slavic (those everyone here writes as I and U,
jer's(?)), and the i's and u's of the Japanese syllabic script (now I
forgot which is katakana and which is hiragana). They disappear in
the same way, if I may say so.
Except Japanese -tu- > -tsu- > -ts-, which Russian doesn't do. But it
makes Miguel's -tW > -s more believable.

Torsten