From: Peter T. Daniels
Message: 4736
Date: 2005-04-17
>It's _always_ necessary! Maybe if you make it clear to your Thai
> (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.
> I got a lot of stick when I remarked thatBut, in the script, it _is_ "really" long, no? QED!
> 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
> apply a historically explicable rule of thumb to deduce from the spelling"Qur'anic orthography" seems to indicate that the original consonantal
> 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.
> >> The spelling strongly indicates that glottal stops (written with theYou could only be bringing in Hebrew and Aramaic if you're not
> >> 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,Nothing to do with the transfer from Phoenician to Greek.
> >> 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?
> What about the use of he for /e/ and heth forThere was no /h/ in the variety of Greek for which the alphabet was
> /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?
> >> Alone:Meaning what? Pali and Sanskrit are two different languages that can be
> >> 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.