From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 4638
Date: 2005-04-12
> suzmccarth wrote:thought
>
> >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
> >of as syllabic under certain conditions.Prenasalisation is also pretty common - very comparable to
> >
> 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).
>(You also get conflicts, with phonological rules forbiddingHistory plays a very large role here. For example, Proto-Tai started
> 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.