(25-09-2016, 12:09 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sam G Wrote:That's admittedly possible, but eo and eeo are fairly rare as word endings.
They are much rarer than ey and eey, but the question is whether they are valid. If we're willing to accept that o is a vowel, and that y can be a vowel, why can we not accept they are both vowels in the same environment?
It's possible, but there are also words ending in
es and
ees so interpreting
y as a consonant in this context also makes sense (assuming we regard
s as a consonant).
Also there are words ending in
oy, which are admittedly very rare but this would also point to
y functioning as a consonant (in parallel with common o-endings
ol and
or).
Though again, my main reason for thinking that
y is a syllabic consonant is that while on the one hand it seems to usually behave as a vowel, on the other hand it seems to be part of a coherent system along with other letters that appear to be consonants, as I briefly outlined here: You are not allowed to view links.
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Quote:Quote:Well, I did not know that, but it's not a problem if y and l are syllabic consonants representing liquids.
Can I ask for some examples or arguments for why l is syllabic? I know that lk appears, but I doubt l is syllabic here. It could be a digraph or even perfectly reasonable as part of a cluster.
A word like
lkaiin would seem to parallel
ykaiin, would it not? And again there's the fact that
y and
l seem to be related generally.
Quote:Quote:I don't see why this should be true. The Wikipedia page on syllabic consonants provides counterexamples in English: A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle... In both "rhythm" and "button" you have a syllabic nasal following a consonant.
These only work because the following nasal is its own syllable. Onset clusters of obstruent + nasal are less common typically. Voynichese could have them but I would want to explore the alternatives first.
What I'm saying is that the nasal could be its own syllable in Voynichese, too. So a word like
okchdy could be a three-syllable word, as we might also interpret
okeedy to be.
And I'm definitely not certain that
ch and
Sh are nasals. It's just something that seems possible. Actually the main problem I see with it is that it's not clear what we would then make of the fact that
ch can combine with gallows letters like
k to form
cKh. Assuming the gallows letters are stops and/or affricates, is there such a thing as a "nasalized stop" or a "nasalized affricate"?
Or conversely, if we take
cKh to be something like an aspirated or glottalized form of
k, as seems possible, then the most straightforward interpretation of
ch would seem to be as some kind of fricative. Then is there such a thing as a "syllabic fricative"?
(25-09-2016, 02:04 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (25-09-2016, 12:09 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I don't see why this should be true. The Wikipedia page on syllabic consonants provides counterexamples in English: A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle... In both "rhythm" and "button" you have a syllabic nasal following a consonant.
...
I don't understand why Wikipedia would use button as an example, alongside rhythm and bottle. Rhythm is a good example, but "button" has the vowel in front of it. The consonant "n" isn't syllabic on its own.
It's talking about how these words are pronounced, not how they're spelled. Phonetically the second syllable of "button" doesn't contain a vowel, it's just a syllabic "n".