Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> (Best viewed with a Thai encoding.)
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote on Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:30 PM
> > Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> >> 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?
>
> So far it's not been necessary.

It's _always_ necessary! Maybe if you make it clear to your Thai
audience that language and script are two very different things, you'll
get your points across more easily.

Thai is a good candidate for such a discussion because of all the
historical letters that are hanging around not doing much of anything.

> I got a lot of stick when I remarked that
> Thai àÅè1 'play' had a short vowel in the context of Thai not always being
> able to show both the tone and the vowel length. I had Thais screaming, in
> definance of the facts, that the vowel was 'really' long. One needs to

But, in the script, it _is_ "really" long, no? QED!

> apply a historically explicable rule of thumb to deduce from the spelling
> that this word has a short vowel. (We've had similar grief elsewhere from a
> Thai for remarking that 1éÓ 'water' usually has a long vowel despite its
> spelling. That is usually the first irregular spelling pointed out to
> learners.) What I'm really looking for by way of reply is examples where
> spelling shows a final glottal stop by using a consonant symbol.
>
> > Every "vowel-initial" word in German begins with a glottal stop, but of
> > course it isn't written.

> Whereas in Thai, every 'vowel-initial _syllable_' starts with a glottal
> stop, written as such!
>
> >> 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 Í. Classical Arabic is based on more conservative dialects.
>
> > Do you mean Qur'aninc orthography, or do you mean the Arabic language?
>
> I mean that the Koranic orthography shows a reduction in glottal stops that
> is not manifest in the Classical Arabic pronunciation, whence the hamza on
> waw and a modified ya to clearly show the Classical Arabic pronunciation.
> Hamza's use on initial alif may reinforce this example.

"Qur'anic orthography" seems to indicate that the original consonantal
text was recorded by speakers of a dialect that had lost glottal stop
(and case endings, and nunation) and the pointing was added by speakers
of another variety -- the one underlying the Standard language -- that
retained such features.

> >> 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

You could only be bringing in Hebrew and Aramaic if you're not
distinguishing script and language. There's no reason to suppose /'/ and
/`/ were lost in Hebrew and Aramaic until (in some varieties) recently,
and several distinctions that couldn't be recorded with the Phoenician
consonant inventory were preserved at least until the time of the
Septuagint.

> >> 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).
>
> How about digamma for /w/? Surely you haven't forgotten that 'f', 'u', 'v'
> and 'y' all derive from waw?

Nothing to do with the transfer from Phoenician to Greek.

> What about the use of he for /e/ and heth for
> /h/? Was that because Greek /h/ was [x] at the time and therefore closer to
> the sound of he than of heth? I admit I can't think of any argument that
> /h/ wasn't [x] at the time. Just how arbitrary was the use of aleph, he and
> ayin for /a/, /e/ and /o/ rather than some other pemutation?

There was no /h/ in the variety of Greek for which the alphabet was
derived. That's why the two breathings were invented, centuries later.

He > e, heth > long e.

> >> 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?
>
> Pali/Sanskrit.

Meaning what? Pali and Sanskrit are two different languages that can be
written with any of the scripts that developed from Brahmi. What do you
want to compare with Thai (writing)?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...