At 19:31 21.11.2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>>Yes. Syllable-final vowels and vowels before a single
>>short word-final consonant are long if they are stressed.
>
>This would seem to say that the length of a vowel is conditioned by context
>and is not contrastive. Is that correct?
Yes, though some (you here, Andreas?) would want
to argue that in modern Swedish it is vowel length
that is contrastive while consonant length is
automatic. IMNSHO both models involve some
contextual and morphological complications,
e.g. why does _hård_ have a long vowel but _hårt_
a short one (since it is underlying _hård+t_.)
>>Danish has both long and short vowels.
>
>Then I've got to be about as dumb as it gets not to have noticed this. Can
>you give me any minimal pairs?
Not off the top of my head. Is Lars around?
>>FWIW the Zagreb dialect of Croatian has apparently
>>lost all distinctions of vowel length and tone
>>quite traceless in all contexts. People just
>>stopped to make the distinctions, or rather the
>>younger speakers failed to acquire them.
>
>This is good news. It would mean that I could simply drop the long vowels
>at the appropriate stage of the language's development and not have to
>apologize for it
Exactly. :)
>by turning them into something else (e.g.
>diphthongs.) Doing things this way would not only be simpler (which is
>nice), but it wouldn't do any violence to the shape of the modern words as
>I have already conceived them - I wouldn't have to change the basic look
>and feel of the language.
>
>>>Long vowels without any geminate consonants is quite frequent.
>
>In which case, I think that I will simply start the proto-language off with
>long vowels and no geminate consonants. That way, I don't have to go to
>the trouble of removing the geminate consonants later as well. (Unless I
>decide that geminates would do nice things to the stress patterns in the
>language before they are lost, but I think that that is throwing in a
>wildcard that I probably don't want.)
>
>Isidora
/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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