ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (11/26/85)
>>...sounds like /s/, of which we can >>say with confidence that it has certain phonetic properties >>(energy concentrated above 4000 Hz) and certain phonological >>ones (is syllabic if any fricatives within a langauge are syllabic). > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > - reilly@iuvax >I'm glad someone brought this up. Hooper (in her book "Natural >Generative Phonology") also claimed that [s] was syllabic in English but >not in Spanish. >Mike Maxwell I infer that `syllabic' means `vowel-like', at least to my Indo-European bias which prefers a vowel in the nucleus of every syllable. I would instead argue that the closest English has to syllabic /s/ would be in the context /0/+_, analogous to syllabic /l,r,w,y,n,m/ or even /z/. In the below, capitalization means syllabicization: mistress /mistrS/ (or /mistr0s/) bosses /bosZ/ (or /bos0z/) bottom /batM/ (or /bat0m/ happen /haepN/ (or /haep0n/) flapper /flaepR/ (or /flaep0r/ apple /aepL/ (or /aep0l/) happy /haepY/ (or /haep0y/) fellow /felW/ (or /fel0w/) If /s,v/ in the above are syllabic, I suppose one would likewise consider /f,v,sh/ to be syllabic in {bailiff,active,fetish} as well, not to mention j in {garbage}. Note that all the syllabicized consonants above are in unstressed positions. In the English speech I've heard, it could be argued that /R,L/ can occur stressed, as: fur /fR/ (or /fur/, /faar/ nb: /aa/ = u in cut) full /fL/ (or /ful/) As to /s/ in /sp-,sk-,sm-../, I have probably misunderstood Mike Maxwell's (and Hooper's) point, but /s/ in such contexts sounds seems to be as nonsyllabic as /s/ ever can be (in English, that is). Mandarin Chinese is one of the few languages I know to have a sibilant vowel. This sound, which resembles a mixture of of `es' in `bridges' and `i' in `ill', occurs after /ts/, /dz/, /s/: Pinyin Wade Giles (vocabulary) /tsZ hwey/ cihui t'zu huei Chuang Tzu /chwang dzZ/ chuang zi ch'uang tzu Szechuan /sZ chwan/ si chuan szu ch'uan -michael