--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@...> 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).

Prenasalisation is also pretty common - very comparable to
'presigmatisation'.

>(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.

History plays a very large role here. For example, Proto-Tai started
out with *phr-, *pr-, *br-, *?br- and *mr- (possibly plus rare *vr and
*fr). In the development to Thai, only *br- kept both elements,
though this was the combination with the second least difference in
sonority! (*br- has become /phr/.) *mr- probably kept the two
elements for a long time, but now one sees ma-l-, m-, l- or, in _one_
instance, r-. (It's possible that l- is due to *ml-.) Thai has
restored /pr/, from Indian loans, and may be restoring /br/ from
English loans.

These developments tend to be hidden by the writing system -
anaptyctic vowels don't get written in Thai.

Indo-European shows a similar picture with s mobile. s+stop has been
much stabler than s+sonorant, where /s/ has been consistently lost
before nasals and liquids in Latin and Greek, w.g. English 'snow' but
French 'neige'.

Richard.