Re: How are syllable boundaries determined


Peter T. Daniels wrote:
ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
mb wrote:
António Marques wrote:
...
Right. Whereas those who went to incredible lengths to mark quantity
and tone in excruciating detail, like the Alexandrians, managed to
torture schoolkids for 1,600-1,800 years after all length and pitch
distinctions were lost. Just to avoid being charged with that crime,
Western grammarians still continue to use all the funny signs.

Fascinating! Can I find a Latin Bible or The Aenid or JGC's "The
Conquest of Gaul" with the funny signs?

The Alexandrians didn't write Latin.

1600-1800 years back, Alexandria was in the Roman empire, so there must
have been some Alexandrians who wrote Latin. I thought mb's statement
implied that Alexandrian Latin scribes retained some Greek conventions
when they wrote Latin too, such as using a Greek stress accent
(originally used for pitch?) for either or both of Latin stress and
long vowels.

Hardly anyone in the eastern Empire used Latin. Perhaps you were
misinformed by Mel Gibson's movie. Alexandria was a Greek city
throughout.

There was no Eastern Empire 1800 years back (although there was one
1600 years back). Even after there was an Eastern Empire, though, the
movers and shakers fancied they were Romans and continued using Latin
for administration through the turn of the 7th century.

The ancients wouldn't seem to have needed to if they didn't have a
distinction between diphthongs and vowel + consonant. For comparison,
in Devanagari, <houseboat> is written as /havsboT/ whereas sauna is
written as /saUnA/ and pronounced as [havsbo:t.] and /sA.:nA/,
respectively.

A pity the Indians never managed to master English.

[havsbo:t] is in low registers; in the US, I've come across a few
natives who would say something like [h&wsbou"t] which makes it sound
vaguely like "haves boat" which doesn't seem a whole lot better
sounding than the North Indian "hoves boat".

As for /sA.:nA/, carefully note that I transcribed it with phonemes,
meaning that it's pronounced as if it were a Hindi word with that
sequence of phonemes. /A.:/ is realized somewhere in the range betwen
[A.:] and an [aU] diphthong which is closer to the Finnish than is the
En_US cot/ caught merged monophthong. As for terminal /A:/, it is
pronounced something like [a] which might be closer to the Finnish than
the En_US terminal [@].

.

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