Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

>
> 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).

Or,

(I have had no telephone since Saturday)

We can look to Roman Jakobson's distinctive feature classification:

cns voc

consonant + -
vowel - +
sonorant - -
glide + +

(I may have the assignments of the last two rows backward!)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...