Re: Pronunciation of "Chthonic"

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 15:25:26 GMT: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

It is difficult at all for people in
whose language such a sequence does not occur.

It was difficult at all? Is there a "not" missing, or is this a new
idiom I wasn't aware of? Isn't "at all" only possible in questions and
negative sentences?

It is called a "speech act joke." You used a negative polarity item, and
I negated it on the surface, using a construction that is not possible
in English.

OK, that's more or less what I expected. Joke appreciated.

This displays unfamiliarity with the concept of phonotactics.

I have known the concept since around 1972 or 1973, except that the
book that explained it then called it "distribution rules".

Was this the same book that failed to teach you the meaning of
"phoneme"?

By repeating an untruth you don't make it any more true.

My line of thinking was: if I can say that, not having [T] in my
language, and not having /x/ + fricative, and seeing that Modern Greek
has many initial consonant clusters that do not occur in Dutch, I'd
expect they'd have no difficulty with it.

Modern Greek was not the topic.

But the late forms of classical in which the aspirated phonemes had
already turned into fricatives were.

But you are right, what I can say is irrelevant for what Greeks can
say.

Nothing to do with what Greeks can or cannot say. The topic is the
English word named in the header, and it briefly turned to Hebrew.

And in the very message I responded to, it had briefly turned to
Greek.
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
.

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