Re: Somewheres

Peter Moylan wrote:

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.

Spoken Danish drops as much as possible. "Synes" => "sys", "trapperne"
=> "trappern", and there are many more examples.

In dk.kultur.sprog (language) we joked with pronouncing
"socialdemokratiet" with three syllables (it has 8).

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark