Meta-Morphological Allophony

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
Post Reply
Ċeaddawīc
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 49
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 4:31 am

Meta-Morphological Allophony

Post by Ċeaddawīc »

The title sounds educated enough, right? Right?

Anyways, I was musing over this sentence I uttered earlier in the day:

"Are you going to watch The Community today?"

which ended up sounding a bit like:

[ɑɹʷˠ jʉw ˈgə.nɐ wɑtʃ dðɐ km̩.ˈˈju.nɪ.di‿dɵ.ˈdej]

(the double-primary stress is the stress of the sentence)

I usually have an allophony rule where [t] is changed to [d] or [ɾ] when intervocalic and in an unstressed syllable. I usually pronounce "today" with a [t] at the beginning, but, as you can see, I pronounced it with a [d].

So my question is this: do all languages have such sentence-level allophony as well as word-level allophony? Is this common? I would think that many languages would have such a feature, but I was just curious if they actually did and what it was like. If other languages have it, does it derive from normal word-level allophony like in my example?

Another possibility is that the allophony rule above is just changing so that word-inital [t]s also change.

Thoughts?
[ˈwiɹʷˤb̚.mɪn]

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

Re: Meta-Morphological Allophony

Post by Nortaneous »

yes, allophony doesn't necessarily have to pay attention to word boundaries
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

User avatar
Radius Solis
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1248
Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 5:40 pm
Location: Si'ahl
Contact:

Re: Meta-Morphological Allophony

Post by Radius Solis »

If anything, conlangers are too quick to assume that most phonological rules do operate at the word level or the morpheme level... perhaps because the structure of English leads us to think of words as the most important units, I don't know. But certainly, phonological rules that apply to whole phrases at a whack without respect to word boundaries within them, are a dime a dozen in the world's languages.

Post Reply