zompist bboard

Arzena wrote:Second, languages with extensive consonant clusters tend to simplify the clusters.

Tell that to the Georgians.

For example, in recordings of the Bible in languages of the Pacific Northwest, I have heard more schwas than were written in the accompanying text.

It's like Arabic, there's much more vowels than written in the text! ;)


JAL

Arzena wrote:For example, in recordings of the Bible in languages of the Pacific Northwest, I have heard more schwas than were written in the accompanying text.

Are those recordings made by native speakers of those languages?

I don't think there's any reason to doubt they were--epenthetic schwa insertion is extremely common in those languages in certain contexts such as song and instances where careful enunciation is important (like reading religious texts)

jal wrote:

Arzena wrote:Second, languages with extensive consonant clusters tend to simplify the clusters.

Tell that to the Georgians.

actually georgian is a pretty good example: /v/ in clusters often surfaces as labialization of the preceding consonant (if there is one), and epenthetic schwas abound.

thetha wrote:I don't think there's any reason to doubt they were--epenthetic schwa insertion is extremely common in those languages in certain contexts such as song and instances where careful enunciation is important (like reading religious texts)

Kind of like Hindi then!

Vijay wrote:

Arzena wrote:For example, in recordings of the Bible in languages of the Pacific Northwest, I have heard more schwas than were written in the accompanying text.

Are those recordings made by native speakers of those languages?

Another thing--is the presence of literal "schwa" vowels established by phonetic analysis of the recordings, or is is just something that you hear with your bare ears? Native speakers of languages that don't allow certain clusters will often hear schwas, or other kinds of epenthetic vowels, that aren't phonetically there. E.g. Japanese speakers not being able to hear the difference between "pr" and "pur", etc. John Wells's' blog has a post about this phenomenon with English speakers and "Gdańsk". My understanding is that there's a difference between schwa and mere audible release (e.g. in a contemporary Parisian accent, a word like "goutte" will rarely be pronounced with word-final schwa, but the /t/ will generally have an audible release, unlike the /t/ in a typical English realization of "boot"). English consonant clusters tend to be highly coarticulated with masked release for all but the last consonant, but this is not so much the case in all languages.

jal wrote:

Arzena wrote:Second, languages with extensive consonant clusters tend to simplify the clusters.

Tell that to the Georgians.

COSMIC BRAIN: Clusters in Georgian are actually one consonant