Long occlusive combined with syllable break

Question

The transcription of the word ecce in ecclesiastical pronunciation doesn't make sense to me, as there is a combination of a syllable break and a long occlusive.

These are the two notations for /ecce/: ['et.t͡ʃe] - ['et͡ːʃe].

The two c make the [t] sound, and at the same time in the middle of the two c there's a syllable break. I was thinking something close to the percussive bilabial [ʬ], like a percussive t and an unpercussive t, something like:

Percussive diacritic ꜛ, Unpercussive diacritic ꜜ ---> ['etꜛ.tꜜ͡ʃe]

In this way, the long [t] is emulated and we still manage to see the syllable break. Is there any other formal/official way to write this, or should we add a new diacritic in the IPA?

Note

I don't think [t.t] is equivalent to [t:], as with [t.t] you have to unarticulate [t] and then rearticulate it, for example [t.t.t.t.t] is like emulating gun shots and not a really a long [t::::]. Am I crazy?

Answer 1

If you want a narrow phonetic trascription, it can be written as ['et̚.t͡ʃe]. The arrows are not actually percussive or "unpercussive" diacritics but are used for signifying tone.

[t.t] is just a broad transcription here, just like in some English dialects "cat" can be pronounced [kæt̚] but still gets transcribed as [kæt].

Answer 2

Syllable breaks are not a phonetic entity, which is why on Wiktionary, the transcription "ˈet.t͡ʃe" actually appears between phonemic slashes, not phonetic brackets: "/ˈet.t͡ʃe/, [ˈɛtː͡ʃe]".

The reason for supposing there is a syllable break is because Latin phonotactics doesn't allow a long consonant sound to occur at the start or end of a syllable: e.g. you can't have a syllable like cce or ecc in Latin. (The words "hic" and "hoc" seem to have been pronounced in Classical Latin with a long [kː] sound when followed by a word starting with a vowel, but this was probably simplified to short [k] before a consonant.) In other words, the syllable break is theoretical, not something you should be trying to pronounce.

In terms of pronunciation, what you have is as follows:

• An approach phase, where the tongue is put in place behind the alveolar ridge to articulate a postalveolar stop
• A hold phase, where the tongue is pressed firmly enough against the top of the mouth to block airflow. Since [tː͡ʃ] is a long consonant, the hold phase is maintained for a longer period of time than it is for the short counterpart [tʃ]
• A release phase. After the extended hold period, the stop portion of the affricate is released, meaning the tongue lets some air past it. Since [tː͡ʃ] is an affricate sound, the release involves audible frication: even though air is moving past the tongue, the tongue is positioned in such a way that it partially obstructs the airflow and produces a [ʃ] sound.

That's it. There's nothing in the middle of the hold phase that separates the "t" and "t͡ʃ" in "/ˈet.t͡ʃe/": despite the presence of a syllable break in the phonemic notation, it is not a stop followed by a distinct affricate /t͡ʃ/, but merely an extended affricate.