From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61195
Date: 2008-11-02
> From: bmscotttg <BMScott@...>And you can point out that there is the same relationship between /W/ (consonantal ü) and /ü/ in French as there is between /w/ and /u/
> Subject: [tied] Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Saturday, November 1, 2008, 10:12 PM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
> <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
> > From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
>
> >>> 3. it never appears in initial clusters C-l-
> or C-r (when
> >>> most other consonants do)
>
> >> Your hyphenation is confusing; do you mean that
> [wl-] and
> >> [wr-] don't occur? That's also true of
> modern English,
> >> which certainly has /w/.
>
> > the issue was about initial clusters.
> > -initial clusters- can you read your own mother tongue
> !?
>
> I'm talking about initial clusters, as should be
> obvious from the
> fact that I wrote [wr-] with a hyphen. The point is that
> /w/ is
> an English phoneme that does not occur in initial /wr-/ and
> /wl-/
> clusters (though it did in Old English).
>
> > as regards French,
> > I was meaning that initial clusters like #wr- and #wl-
> don't exist,
> > but this is only one more feature.
>
> And I was pointing out that since they also don't exist
> in English,
> which certainly has a phoneme /w/, it's a rather
> unconvincing feature.
>
> > The point was the sound -w- only appears in very
> limited contexts,
> > as a prevocalic component of diphthongues.
>
> So? It's a glide phoneme; why should it behave like a
> fully
> consonantal phoneme? (By the way, every serious linguistic
>
> description of French that I've read gives French three
> glide
> phonemes, /w/, /j/, and /turned-h/.)