suzmccarth wrote:

>I want to ask about something that I truly hope can not be
>controversial - I mentioned last fall that I sometimes thought of
>phonemes in 3 groups - consonants, continuants and vowels (rather than
>2 groups - consonants and vowels) and that continuants might be thought
>of as syllabic under certain conditions.
>

Vowels vs Consonants is too simple a classification. From what I can
recall from my Phonology class, phonemes lie along a spectrum of
sonority, and syllables are organized (roughly) in rising sonority to
the peak (e.g. a vowel) and then descending sonority afterwards (plus
the possibility of "s" which tends to break the rules). And different
languages have different cutoffs for sonority in order to be a syllable
peak. So in Japanese, you have the vowels plus n, in English you have
vowels plus liquids plus nasals (more or less), as in "able" and
"prism," while in Berber (I am told) just about anything can be
syllabic. Once you get beyond fairly open continuants (i.e., what we
call vowels), nasals and liquids have the next highest sonority (exactly
which is higher depends on the language in question), then fricatives
and then stops, with voiced sounds always having higher sonority than
unvoiced. (You also get conflicts, with phonological rules forbidding
sounds too close in sonority, or in the wrong order, from coming in to
contact. For example, in English, a syllable onset of "fl-" is
perfectly legal: flay, flip, fly, etc. But "vl-" is not, except in
borrowings like Vlad and vlei (which latter is probably pronounced with
an fl- anyway). Because the v is higher in sonority than the f, and so
gets too close to the l. All this according to my probably-faulty
memories of Phonology class; don't get too stressed if I'm wrong).


~mark