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Possible Syllable Nuclei

 
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Wed Jun 02, 2010 2:27 am    Post subject: Possible Syllable Nuclei Reply with quote

Stemming a little from Eldin's recent discussion on superheavy syllables and on some musings of my own, I was wondering what phonemes simply cannot be syllable nuclei.

Obviously vowels can. (And what approximants can't count as on-glides and off-glides, like /r\/ and /l/.)
Nasals. Trills, perhaps.
Voiced fricatives seem unsurprising.
Unvoiced vowels happen in a few languages (not phonemically though).
Unvoiced fricatives seem to be proven by Salishan languages.

So what about voiced stops? Unvoiced stops, even? They seem viable to me: I can pronounce the nonsense word /kt=.na/ without much effort.
There seems to be a prohibition between having a stop as a coda in a syllable that has a stop as a nucleus, though.

Anything else that just doesn't work?
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Aeetlrcreejl



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PostPosted: Wed Jun 02, 2010 8:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stops, IMHO, seem rather unstable as syllable nuclei.
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 3:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I'd expect an epenthetic central vowel to pop up fast.
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 10:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

In some dialects of English there's a syllabic voiced stop, /b=/, in the word /"pro.b=.,bli/ <probably>. The vowel (a schwa) is disappearing, rather than appearing; there are other 'lects where it's pronounced just /"pro.bli/, just a two-syllable word. And of course there are those pronouncing it /"pro.b@.,bli/.

I'd say that only the least sonorant phoneme(s) of a language can't ever be a syllable nucleus; or, more precisely and accurately, any phoneme which never appears except next to some more-sonorant phoneme in the same word, can't be a syllable nucleus, while any phoneme that ever appears between two less-sonorant phonemes in the same word, can be a syllable nucleus. A phoneme which fits in neither of those categories may be or may not be, I don't know.

I don't remember the examples but I think someone has written that any pulmonic egressive phoneme can be syllabic, and probably is in some language or other. That would mean that even voiceless stops could be syllabic in some languages. I think perhaps the clicks (velaric ingressive) and ejectives (glottalic egressive) and so on may not be syllabic in any language.

One of the articles on syllabic consonants, nuclear consonants, and consonantal syllables I've read, says all of them are diachronically short-lived phenomena. Either the syllable is changed so that some vowel is added to it and becomes its new nucleus, its formerly nuclear consonant being shoved to one margin or the other; or, the nuclear consonant is changed into a nuclear vowel somehow (e.g. Z --> j or v --> w); or, the syllable is broken up and its nuclear consonant is either added to the coda of the preceding syllable or to the onset of the following syllable. (Or some other thing I've failed to think of, but those are all I can thing of at the moment.)

They also said consonantal nuclei only ever occur in non-stressed syllables. Also, consonantal syllables tend not to have clusters for onsets (though some do), tend not to have clusters for codas (though some do), and tend not to have both an onset and a cluster; so they're typically only one or two consonants, just the nucleus, or the nucleus and a one-consonant onset, or the nucleus and a one-consonant coda.
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 11:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That seems to agree with common sense and my own observations.

Quote:
In some dialects of English there's a syllabic voiced stop, /b=/, in the word /"pro.b=.,bli/ <probably>. The vowel (a schwa) is disappearing, rather than appearing; there are other 'lects where it's pronounced just /"pro.bli/, just a two-syllable word. And of course there are those pronouncing it /"pro.b@.,bli/.

Case in point (regarding instability). I seem to remember having stumbled across syllabic unvoiced stops in my idiolect of English, but I can't think of one ATM.
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