Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant

--- On Fri, 10/31/08, Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:

> From: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...>
> Subject: Re: [tied] Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Friday, October 31, 2008, 4:41 PM
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rick McCallister"
> <gabaroo6958@...>
> > >
> > > ==========
> >
> > You have cases like
> > Spanish continúo /kontinuo/ "I continue"
> > /k@.../
> > and continuo /kontinwo/ "continual"
> /k@...@l/
> > where /u/ and /w/ seem to be allophonic in both
> Spanish and
> > English
> > ===========
> >
> > i don't think Spanish
> > nor any Romance language (but northern French)
> > has a phoneme /w/.
>
> That's a crock of pure bolshevik.
> Spanish writes /w/ as <CuV>, generally as <guV>
> or <huV>
> French has <oui> /wi/
> ===========
> No,
> as regards French
> oui is a vocalic diphtongue [ui]
> as is shown from the fact
> that the homophone word ouie makes "liaison"
> such as les Z-ouies with Z in plural
> something that is impossible with a consonant initial.
> The fact that it sounds like [wi] is irrelevant
> from the point of view of French phonology,
> [wi] is a vocalic diphtongue /ui/
> and there is no /w/ phoneme.
> [w] is a "sound" not a phoneme.
> In slow "spelling" speech, oui is /u/+/i/ not
> **/wi/.

Phonetics is all about sound, you're talking about convention. If French <oui> sounds like English <we>, then <ouV> and <wV> are the same sound
--at least until someone shows me otherwise
Liaison is a convention and the liaison of oui is rooted in another time when it was pronounced /ui/. But if I went down the streets of Paris saying /ui/ instead of /wi/, wouldn't people give me some strange stares? Or at least more stares than they usually give Americans butchering their language?

>
> I suppose a native speaker of English would never spell
> week as oo-eek in
> two syllables,
> but ouie is spelled this way : ou-i(e) two syllables.
>
> This is not true in Northern French
> where wagon is /wagoN/
> and **les Z-wagons is impossible.
> and wagon would not be spelled ou-a-gon.
> You can contrast it with les Z-oies /ua/
> standard French is les /V/agons with /v/ instead of /w/.
>
> and I guess the same is true in Spanish.
> huevos in plural probably syllabicates as lo-swe-vos
> not like los-we-vos
> but I'm not a speaker of Spanish so I let you say how
> it works.
>
> This has nothing to do with bolshevism,
> I'm afraid your phonological approach is a bit
> superficial and tainted by
> the fact you are a native speaker of a language where /w/
> is a phoneme.
>
> Arnaud

In Spanish, it's definitely /lo-swe-Bos/ or /lo-hwe-Bo/
but you do have variations such as
un huevo as /uN-we-Bo/ (with velar n) vs / u-nwe-Bo/
of course, not everyone uses velar N