[tied] Re: IE lexical accent

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> Richard:
> > Do not English <twelfths> and <sixths> contain absurd strings?

And

> > Jens has heard [ptkllI] in English.
>
> As a native North American English speaker I've never heard such a

thing

> nor would I expect to since it completely violates known

phonotactics of

> our language. English doesn't have five consonant clusters like

this.

> Am I seeing that correctly, double "l"??

Yes. This pronunciation was discussed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/16339 and again at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/17397 .

>
> As for "twelfths" and "sixths", I happen to pronounce them

[twElfs] and

> [siks], the latter word being homophonous with "six". I just can't

be

> bothered tripping my tongue on a cluster like [lfTs] and I'm sure

I'm

> not the only one.
>
> At any rate, English has rules even on what is allowable and what

isn't

> in a syllable. This is simply too well documented to have a such

an empty

> philosophical debate about and English is just like any language

in this

> respect.

And the rules are a lot simpler if you stick to monomorphemic
words. With inflected words, there is a tension between the
tendency to preserve morpheme's shapes and the tendency to conform
to frequent patterns - consider the variation in the pronunciation
of <width> and <length>

> So we should expect any language including IE, any prestages of
> IE, Uralic, EA and Altaic to all follow suit with this common

sense.

There's plenty of precendent for inflected forms having more complex
syllable structures. I've heard that final /stf/ in Russian only
occurs in the genitive plural of nouns ending in <stvo> (I'm not
sure of the stress.)

Richard.