Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:02:08 -0400, Mark E. Shoulson <mark@...> wrote:
>
> > Vowels vs Consonants is too simple a classification. From what I can
> > recall from my Phonology class, phonemes lie along a spectrum of
> > sonority,
>
> I'd welcome a definition of sonority; it is pitch, loudness, brightness,
> or something else, or a combination? Although I think in terms of physics
> and musical acoustics, musical equivalents would be helpful.

Hah! There's something called the Sonority Hierarchy, which appears to
play a part in all sorts of phonological/phonotactic restrictions --
except that [s], which would seem to be of very low sonority, behaves in
all sorts of ways that appear to violate the SH.

It's discussed in, for instance, D. Gary Miller's small book on archaic
Greek and other writing (I forget the title; I reviewed it in vol. 1 no.
1, IIRC, of Written Language and Literacy), and also in Woodard's book
on the Greek alphabet.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...