On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 23:10, Ian Spackman wrote:
> I've heard (and it seems to be true of me) that words like "tiny" are in
> terms of breath flow (I don't know how to put that technically)
> monosyllabic.  And interestingly, it seems to be these
> "really-monosyllabic" disyllables that take the comparative in "-er" rather
> than "most" normally (although that is not a hard and fast rule).

That sounds interesting. Anyone know more?

> On the other hand, in terms of sonority, I recall arguing with the teacher
> when I was 8 (if it wasn't 7) that "sail" has two syllables - the syllabic
> l was to my ear clearly more sonorous than the glide at the end of the
> diphthong (if only I had had the vocabulary to explain back then!).

I don't just get a syllabic l there, I get a full on [@l]. There's no
way I'd describe it as monosyllabic ([s&ij@l]). Words like 'feel' turned
the *[i:] + *[@] into [I:], and so I get a monosyllable back again, but
this time /fI:l/ (same phoneme as in 'beard', /bI:d/).

>
> To confuse matters further, I recall that Roger Lass found it convenient to
> invoke ambisyllabicity to describe English at some point (though I cant
> quite recall why).  (I'm recall this mostly because I invented
> ambisyllabicity myself when I was in elementary school, and was glad to see
> someone else thought it useful....)

I understand they're used because in a word like 'happy', we have a
short stressed vowel, so it 'Must' be in a stressed syllable, but then
we want to have the -p- in the next syllable, too, so we say it's in
both. I don't see any advantage to that over ["h&.pi] (which, I would
say, matches the phonetic quality quite nicely, ignoring the exact
quality of vowels and consonants...), at least for my dialect, but then,
I'm not a trained linguist, am I?

--
Tristan.