--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "C. Darwin Goranson"
<cdog_squirrel@...> wrote:
>
> Well, in everyday Georgian, I've read, vowels are often
> skimped over, so everything seens to be in consonants.
> Probably more that all the vowels are weakened so much
> that they become unnecessary schwas, which are mostly
> dropped.
Well I know almost nothing about Kartvelian, and it's
off-topic besides, so I suppose I shall have to take
your word for it. However I really have my doubts.
On the other hand though, I can't dismiss what you say
entirely after reading "Syllable-less languages" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable, which article I
found somewhat disturbing to my understanding of the
matter. Also see
http://www.ciil-ebooks.net/html/mp/ch2.htm
for more on the difficulty of defining the syllable.
It may ultimately be, like the problem of measuring the
length of a coastline, that there are various levels
of peaks and valleys in any utterance, and that it is
language-specific which are significant (constitute
syllable boundaries)?
> It's more that some of the combinations with laryngeals
> are potentially difficult. Not to say that even with non-
> laryngeal consonants there aren't tricky words: *dhghem
> (earth) isn't exactly easy to pronounce.
But unless we're talking about an actual difficulty or
impossibility for the human speech mechanism itself,
"difficult" is in the eye (mouth?) of the beholder. As
I pointed out, many speakers of Japanese find common
English consonant clusters no less difficult than you
find ".dhghe."
Consider the German word 'Knödel', in which the 'k'
is pronounced no less than the 'n', or those languages
with pre-nasalized stops that would divide a sequence
like "mandelombungi" into "ma.nde.lo.mbu.ngi"? None
of these languages has any special aversion to vowels
responsible for them accepting such clusters.
Now I have to acknowledge that if you were to hear some
of these clusters pronounced, you might insist that
they do indeed contain a schwa, or more often something
a bit closer than a schwa, but in fact that gesture
involves no wider aperture than is often produced between
two English consonants in certain circumstances, and
in which case an English speaker normally perceives no
extra syllable. In addition, there's no separate initiator
burst for these "schwas", and so they don't properly
constitute syllabic nuclei. (I'm assuming that it isn't
really a "schwa" if it isn't really a vowel?)
If this thread continues it should probably be moved to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phoNet/ .
David