Path: ...!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Peter Moylan Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang Subject: Re: Somewheres Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 23:29:18 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 40 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:29:24 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="8896c48ae87382da13413678d137aaea"; logging-data="3014282"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18Z0Brgsv6nMf+q8SrdKq/8" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:v1fhPIRtuV/tstYEs/PDLVPejFM= In-Reply-To: Bytes: 3057 On 02/09/24 16:13, Madhu wrote: > * (jerryfriedman) > : Wrote on Sun, 1 Sep 2024 19:27:48 +0000: > >> On Sun, 1 Sep 2024 8:37:16 +0000, Paul Carmichael wrote: >> >>> El Sun, 01 Sep 2024 09:49:19 +1000, Peter Moylan >>> >>>> As a singer, I have been told to de-emphasise any final 's'. In >>>> fact, most of the choir is asked to leave it silent. >>> That's how people speak here. "Los olivos" are "loh'holivoh". >> >> Also here in el Norte (of New Mexico). People even say "ahina" for >> "así", which people from other parts of the Spanish-speaking world >> think is funny. > > Does the dropping of the final S go back to Greek or Hebrew? Crossposted to sci.lang, where people might know the answer. Is there a natural tendency for languages to lose final syllables or final consonants? This thread has provided examples in Spanish. French lost a lot of final consonants (in speech, but not in writing) centuries ago. Some southern Italian dialects have dropped a few final vowels, but this does not extend to northern dialects or the mainstream version of the language. Portuguese seems to drop all sorts of things. Those are all examples in Romance languages. I can't think of any examples in Germanic languages, and I don't know enough about other language families. The well-known example in English is the "dropped g", which reduces an -ing ending to -@n. But that's not actually the dropping of a consonant, it's the replacement of one consonant by another. The average English speaker doesn't notice that, because we're not used to thinking of "ng" as a single consonant. -- Peter Moylan peter@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org Newcastle, NSW