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

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 08/01/04 

Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 01:31:51 GMT

Bart Mathias wrote:
>
> 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.

...ford?

> 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/.

But you can hear the voiceless vowel in its effect on the hiss of the
/s/. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net