Re: What's the different between /tS/ as one phoneme and as two?

From: Bart Mathias (bartmathias_at_verizon.net)
Date: 08/01/04 

Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 01:19:49 GMT

Mxsmanic wrote:
> Bart Mathias writes:
>
>
>>Does everybody agree on the number of syllables in "ski" yet?
>
>
> How could it have more than one??

I'm not as well-read as Greg, so I didn't get it directly from Saussure,
but the problem was brought up in a book (that I think I kept when I
retired, but can't find at the moment) by a well-known acoustic
phonetician who's name starts with "Cat..." I'm pretty sure.

As I simplified it for personal consumption, it boiled down to "can
something with silence in the middle be a single syllable?"

Meanwhile, Japanese has a word that is normally pronounced almost
identically to English "ski" (only the "i" is a bit shorter, and in
isolation likely to end with a glottal stop), and it *has* to be two
syllables. Phonemically, it's /suki/.

Bart Mathias

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