The identity of non-identified sounds: glottal stop, prevocalic /w/ and triphthongs in Vietnamese
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Abstract
The phonemic status of the glottal stop has been an issue in many languages of North America and Asia. In Vietnamese, the glottal stop has a distributional restriction in that it occurs only syllable-initially. Whether researchers include it in the initial consonantal inventory varies, and its status has received no systematic analysis. Another sound in dispute is the identity of /w/, the only segment that can occur between the initial consonant and the nucleus vowel. Whether /w/ is a segment, a secondary feature of the initial consonant, or a prosodic feature is an open matter. Its questionable status relates to a third question: Do triphthongs really exist in Vietnamese ?. This paper addresses these three interrelated issues and argues that /w/ is an independent phoneme, the initial glottal stop is best treated as a phoneme, and such triphthongs are phonetic.
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How to Cite
Pham, A. H. (2009). The identity of non-identified sounds: glottal stop, prevocalic /w/ and triphthongs in Vietnamese. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 34. Retrieved from https://twpl.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/twpl/article/view/6803
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