Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> (This posting is best viewed in UTF-8.)
>
> I have been having a discussion at
> http://www.thailandguidebook.com/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=3;t=6817;st=10;r=1
> about whether Thai sara a (ะ, U+0E30) is effectively a consonant, albeit one
> whose sound (the glottal stop) is often dropped in speech. As it the
> discussion has become a duologue between me and 'Alone', I would appreciate
> some outside input on the issues it has raised, especially about other
> writing systems. This is essentially a cross-posting of posting no. 16 in
> that thread. I gave two reasons, A and B. I would like some help with
> answering the response to Reason A, but do feel free to make any on-topic
> comments on the rest of the discussion.
>
> Richard:
> A. Sara a represents a consonant sound, it doesn't combine vertically with
> other vowels,
> [Whoops! I should have said 'with consonants', not 'with other vowels']
>
> Alone:
> Could you give me an example of any languages which have this sound and
> consider it as a consonant?

It looks like you're not being careful to distinguish speech from
writing?

Every "vowel-initial" word in German begins with a glottal stop, but of
course it isn't written.

> Richard:
> Doesn't Thai consider the sound a consonant (ถ) word-initially? If you ask
> the Thai Transcription Service (http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/) to
> transcribe ถà1Sะ, and select IPA mode, you'll get a glottal stop at start and
> end - /?aÌ*?/.
>
> Anyway, here are a few other examples:
>
> 1. Hamza in Arabic.
>
> 2. Ayin (initial and final) in Persian. The sound is also represented by
> initial alif. A striking example is rob' 'quarter', where the glottal stop
> occurs word-finally after a consonant. (Ayin represents a different sound
> in Arabic.)
>
> 3. Khmer? Not only is it present by the same rules as in Thai (with
> yukaleakpintu, not reahmuk), but is also the sound represented by final 'k'
> after /a/-like vowels.
>
> 4. Tagalog? It isn't expressed in the spelling, but it's there all the
> same, both syllable-initially and syllable-finally. I think all Tagalog
> syllables begin with consonants.
>
> 5. Malay. Final 'k' in native words represents a glottal stop. In educated
> use at the very least, this contrasts with final /k/ (also spelt 'k') in
> European loan words. I'm not sure about Arabic loans.
>
> [Can Qalamites suggest any good examples? Or demolish any of my examples?]
>
> Finding clear examples is complicated because Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and
> Pali don't have glottal stops, and it seems that the original dialect of the
> Koran didn't have them after vowels. The Arabic alif is therefore rather
> like Thai ถ. Classical Arabic is based on more conservative dialects.

Do you mean Qur'aninc orthography, or do you mean the Arabic language?

> The spelling strongly indicates that glottal stops (written with the
> consonant aleph) were full-blown consonants in the earliest stages of Hebrew
> and Aramaic, but by the time the vowels were recorded, glottal stops after
> vowels (but not between vowels) had been absorbed into such vowels,
> lengthening them. That's how Latin 'a' derives from the letter for a
> glottal stop, aleph.

No, Greek alpha is /a/ instead of */'/ because Greek doesn't have /'/
(or the other consonant sounds represented by the Phoenician letters
that were turned into vowel letters). Latin script is three generations
away from any language with glottals.

> There is a Devanagari glottal stop for the Limbu language of Nepal, but you
> might argue that this is under the influence of Western-based linguists.
> It's in the Devanagari part of Unicode since Version 4.1, which came out a
> few weeks ago. It looks as though it occurs word-finally, but I'll have to
> check. [The proposal for its inclusion was
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2543.pdf , and one of the contacts
> named there is a member of this group.]
>
> Richard:
> B. In dictionary order sara a is placed as though it were the last
> consonant.
>
> Alone:
> I don't think so. In dictionary order it's placed as a vowel as I can say.
>
> Richard:
> Can you give me an example of whether treating it as a consonant or as a
> vowel would make a difference to alphabetical order? I've convinced myself
> that there can't be any.
>
> Alone:
> For nikkhahit I can accept that it can be a consonant in P/S , but not in
> Thai.
>
> Richard:
> Interesting. Can you give an example of an argument that works for Thai but
> not for P/S?

What's P/S?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...