Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

benlizross wrote:

> > Is there no such thing as an explicable, or principled, gap in _your_
> > theory?
>
> If I had a theory of my own, there would be, sure. The absence of
> initial /N/, or /hC/ clusters, would be a fact about the system.
> It might be more plausible if you argued that long vowels in general (I
> think this is true) don't occur before /N/. So we have sing, sang, sung,
> song, but not corresponding long vowel + N. The absence of /EN/ and /UN/
> words would be accidental, which is why "boong" fits OK.

I stated, not argued, that hours ago.

> > > ("Boong" was mentioned here a
> > > > few days ago -- as an insulting term for Australian native?, which makes
> > > > it an oddity, an "expressive," if you will, outside normal phonology as
> > > > "Bach" is.)
> > >
> > > What nonsense. I suppose this goes with your bizarre dogma that "names
> > > aren't words"?
> >
> > Another of I. J. Gelb's interests was prosopography, so maybe that's
> > where I picked it up. (He was president of the American Names Society
> > for quite a while.) If you don't accept the mainstream theory of the
> > nature of names (or "definite descriptions," to use an archaism), do you
> > have a better account of them?
>
> ???The only sense of "definite description" I know (from Russell) has
> nothing to do with phonology.

What does the nature of names have to do with phonology?

> Perhaps you could give an actual citation of somewhere this "mainstream
> theory" is set out?
>
> In the meantime, I'll say:
>
> - names are words (which are socially assigned to individuals);
> - some names (like some non-names) are foreign words, and thus may
> exhibit extra-systemic phonological features.
>
> >
> > > "Bach" is a foreign name (I don't mean [+foreign] or some
> > > such putative feature, I mean the name of a person from a non-English
> > > speaking culture.) Such names may be de-naturalized to taste, including
> > > the use of non-English phonemes like /x/, but most people use a /k/. (In
> > > fact in my native dialect, where we didn't have anything much like [a],
> > > we pronounced his name to rhyme with "rock".)
> >
> > "Rock" is /rak/. (That's why [a] is called "short o" in traditional
> > grammar.)
>
> I think you mean "traditional [in some personal sense] American English
> phonology".

Hardly. Phonologists call it "low central vowel."

When you learned in school to use a dictionary in Canada a few decades
ago, was that sound not represented as o-breve?

> In fact [a] is called "short o" only because, for some
> people, it is the vowel in a lot of words mainly spelled with <o>. What
> I am telling you is that the composer's name rhymed with "rock" in my
> native phonology, and that I would not consider the vowel in question to
> be phonetically [a].

Then what?

> > > "Boong" may be offensive, but it is no more "outside normal phonology"
> > > than "dago" or "***".
> >
> > Except it now turns out that it isn't an example of /uwN/ at all.
>
> Nobody ever said it was. You misread my /uN/ as equivalent to your
> /uwN/.

You offered it as an example to contradict my assertion that /uwN/ does
not occur in English, so what was I to think?

> And incidentally, you have not explained why Cantonese [U] would be
> expected to be borrowed as English /uw/.

Not [U], but [fUN55]. It came into English as /fuwn/. Nothing to do with
expectations, just a datum.

> > > > If, of course, Australian English has a plethora of words borrowed from
> > > > Australian languages that end in -oong, then a new (Firthian) subsystem
> > > > has arisen,
> > >
> > > Why on earth would you want to postulate a new "subsystem", Firthian or
> > > otherwise? They've simply acquired a new word which includes a phoneme
> > > sequence that wasn't previously instantiated.
> >
> > In nearly 2000 years of the English language, a certain sequence was
> > never "instantiated," and you think that's a coincidence?
>
> You think the phonology of English has been the same for 2000 years??

You think /N/ occurred after long vowels at some point in the history of
English?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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