There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
1b. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Leonardo Castro
1c. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1d. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: R A Brown
1e. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Njenfalgar
1f. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Roger Mills
1g. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: David McCann
2a. Re: Koha
From: Roger Mills
3a. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
From: Roger Mills
3b. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
From: Alex Fink
3c. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
From: Roger Mills
4a. Re: OT: Ranking of living intellectuals.
From: David McCann
5a. Re: Proto-Jardic noun morphology
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
5b. Re: Proto-Jardic noun morphology
From: BPJ
6.1. Re: Field vs armchair linguistics (was:OT YAEPT -omp, -onk_
From: BPJ
Messages
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1a. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 12:05 am ((PST))
On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:01:28 -0200, Leonardo Castro wrote:
>I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
>final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>
>OTOH, this doesn't happen in Spanish and Italian where "r" is always
>pronounced as an alveolar flap. Is the alveolar flap "stronger" than
>other rhotic phonemes?
(The Italian rhotic is, I think, more accurately described as a
trill, and so is the Spanish final rhotic.) I don't know about rhotic
loss in French; I thought there wasn't any. While many English
varieties only have a rhotic approximant, the "rhotic" varieties
keep that approximant in final position. In German, too, there are
standard varieties (not speaking of dialects) that keep the final
rhotic, and if I am not mistaken, this is independent from its
pronunciation. Bavarian varieties of German lose the final rhotic (I
think), even though they have an alveolar trill rhotic, while Eastern
Swiss varieties keep the final rhotic, even though they have an
uvular trill rhotic. Therefore I think the idea that certain
pronunciations of final rhotics are more prone to disappearing is not
accurate, intriguing though it may look at first sight.
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (8)
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1b. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 1:39 am ((PST))
I just noted I should have written "Loss of..."
2013/2/15 J. 'Mach' Wust <[email protected]>:
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:01:28 -0200, Leonardo Castro wrote:
>
>>I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
>>final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>>
>>OTOH, this doesn't happen in Spanish and Italian where "r" is always
>>pronounced as an alveolar flap. Is the alveolar flap "stronger" than
>>other rhotic phonemes?
>
> (The Italian rhotic is, I think, more accurately described as a
> trill, and so is the Spanish final rhotic.) I don't know about rhotic
> loss in French; I thought there wasn't any.
In the case of French, I only perceive an attenuation of r in final
position, but I might be wrong.
> While many English
> varieties only have a rhotic approximant, the "rhotic" varieties
> keep that approximant in final position. In German, too, there are
> standard varieties (not speaking of dialects) that keep the final
> rhotic, and if I am not mistaken, this is independent from its
> pronunciation. Bavarian varieties of German lose the final rhotic (I
> think), even though they have an alveolar trill rhotic, while Eastern
> Swiss varieties keep the final rhotic, even though they have an
> uvular trill rhotic. Therefore I think the idea that certain
> pronunciations of final rhotics are more prone to disappearing is not
> accurate, intriguing though it may look at first sight.
>
> --
> grüess
> mach
Messages in this topic (8)
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1c. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 2:06 am ((PST))
On 15 February 2013 09:05, J. 'Mach' Wust <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> (The Italian rhotic is, I think, more accurately described as a
> trill, and so is the Spanish final rhotic.) I don't know about rhotic
> loss in French; I thought there wasn't any.
Historically, there's been a lot of final rhotic loss in French. Except for
liaison phenomena, nearly all words ending in _-er_ in French have a silent
_r_ (including all infinitives). _-er_ is just a way to write final /e/.
The only exceptions are recent borrowings, especially from English, which
often take a spelling pronunciation (and in which case the final _-er_ gets
pronounced as if it was _-eur_ /œʁ/). I don't know, however, whether the
final rhotic loss happened before or after the shift from an alveolar
rhotic to an uvular one (whether a trill or an approximant).
But synchronically speaking, I'm not aware of any rhotic loss in current
French. In any case, I don't have any.
ObConlang: in my romconlang Narbonese, most final consonants were lost,
including _-r_ (an alveolar trill), nearly unconditionally. But they are
preserved in writing (as in French) as they resurface in liaison phenomena.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (8)
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1d. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "R A Brown" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 3:52 am ((PST))
On 15/02/2013 10:05, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> On 15 February 2013 09:05, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
>>
>> (The Italian rhotic is, I think, more accurately
>> described as a trill, and so is the Spanish final
>> rhotic.)
Yep - AFAIK the Italian /r/ is always trilled; the
difference between _r_ and_-rr_ is, unlike in Spanish,the
duration of the trill.
>> I don't know about rhotic loss in French; I thought
>> there wasn't any.
Certainly, I'm not aware of any in contemporary spoken French.
> Historically, there's been a lot of final rhotic loss in
> French. Except for liaison phenomena, nearly all words
> ending in _-er_ in French have a silent _r_ (including
> all infinitives). _-er_ is just a way to write final /e/.
> The only exceptions are recent borrowings, especially
> from English, which often take a spelling pronunciation
> (and in which case the final _-er_ gets pronounced as if
> it was _-eur_ /œʁ/).
Yep - more below.
> I don't know, however, whether the final rhotic loss
> happened before or after the shift from an alveolar
> rhotic to an uvular one (whether a trill or an
> approximant).
Before.
Indeed, the whole history of the pronunciation of final
consonants in French is a fascinating one (at least to me)
with constant conflict between popular pronunciations and
spelling pronunciations and learned influence. But to go
into all that would make up a sizable thesis :)
The French /r/ was, like the /r/ originally in all the
Romance languages and, presumably in Latin, a linguo-dental
trill; this pronunciation can still be heard in rural areas
of south France till the present day.
The uvular pronunciation does not seem to have become
general in the Parisian area until the 18th century and
during the 19th gradually spread to other areas of France
and got adopted in German as well.
But the historic loss of final /r/ that Christophe refers to
above pre-dated this. The evidence is that _syllable_ final
/r/ was disappearing in the 15th century; e.g. Villon makes
_rouges_ and _courges_ rhyme, as well as _mesle_ and _perle_
(the syllable final _s_ also being silent).
Though syllable final /s/ becoming silent was general (and
came generally to be reflected in spelling by dropping the
_s_ and putting a circumflex on the vowel), the dropping of
syllable final /r/ was obviously fairly widely resisted,
except when word final, and /r/ persists till the present day.
But word final /r/ appears to have become silent by the
beginning of the 16th century, except on words where it had
originally been followed by another consonant, e.g. fer(r),
enfer(n), hiver(n), ver(m) and, possibly, the infinitives in
-ir and -oir (though this is controversial). The survival
of such words did lead to a successful restoration of final
/r/ in the -ir and -oir infinitives (if it had been lost),
and words ending in -our, -eur, -or, -ir, -ur, and -ar(d).
One interesting result of the loss and later restoration is
that when the final -r in words ending in -eur became
silent, they got confused with words ending in -eux and
analogical feminines in --euse were sometimes created; and
many of these (originally analogical) feminines survived
even when final /r/ or --eur was restored; so we now have,
e.g. menteur ~ menteuse; liseur ~ liseuse, etc.
I just love the way that natlangs constantly create their
own irregularities ;)
But the infinitive in -er as well as words adjectives and
nouns -ier and -er (with the exception of _fier_ and quite a
few words ending in -er) resisted all attempts to restore /r/.
>
> But synchronically speaking, I'm not aware of any rhotic
> loss in current French. In any case, I don't have any.
I hear French spoken most days, and I'm not aware of any
loss of final /r/, whether [ʁ], [ʀ] or [r].
> ObConlang: in my romconlang Narbonese, most final
> consonants were lost, including _-r_ (an alveolar
> trill), nearly unconditionally. But they are preserved in
> writing (as in French) as they resurface in liaison
> phenomena.
Nice.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language … began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (8)
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1e. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Njenfalgar" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 4:43 am ((PST))
2013/2/14 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
> I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
> final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>
> OTOH, this doesn't happen in Spanish and Italian where "r" is always
> pronounced as an alveolar flap. Is the alveolar flap "stronger" than
> other rhotic phonemes?
>
I does happen in some dialects of Spanish in southern Spain (Andalusia, and
I think in Murcia as well). In those dialects, however, almost all
syllable-final consonants get lost.
Another interesting language is Catalan, where syllable-final /r/ is
pronounced as a full trill in the Valencian variety (and never omitted),
while it is a flap in Catalonia (and very often omitted, sometimes
resurfacing in liaison-like situations).
Is there any universal tendency which encompasses all these phenomena?
I think there is a universal tendency to drop word-final and syllable-final
stuff. :-)
Greets,
David
--
Yésináne gika asahukúka ha'u Kusikéla-Kísu yesahuwese witi nale lálu wíke
uhu tu tinitíhi lise tesahuwese. Lise yésináne, lina, ikéwiyéwa etinizáwa
búwubúwu niyi tutelíhi uhu yegeka.
http://njenfalgar.conlang.org/
Messages in this topic (8)
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1f. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 6:43 am ((PST))
--- On Fri, 2/15/13, Njenfalgar <[email protected]> wrote:
2013/2/14 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
> I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
> final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
RM I don't recall hearing it much in Brazil when I was there in the late 60s.
But my contact with a lot of spoken Port. was mainly in Sao Paulo. I heard the
velar/uvular /r in Rio and elsewhere, but at that time it was considered a
provincialism and/or slightly lower class....
-------------------------------------------------------
(snips)
I think there is a universal tendency to drop word-final and syllable-final
stuff. :-)
RM Some hold that it's a matter of the "functional load" of such sounds.
Whether it's _universal_ might be debatable, but it certainly occurs in some
laguage families, in particular Austronesian with which I'm familiar, and
judging from some comments of J. Matisoff, in Sino-Tibetan too (this in a
course on S-T that I audited one summer at UMich.). He had something he called
the "continuum of final consonant attrition". It struck me as quite similar to
the situation in lgs. of South Sulawesi (Celebes) that I was working on.
Proto-Austronesian allowed all sort of finals-- vd. and vl. stops, nasals, a
variety of continuants plus uvulars and glottals. The first major branching
("Malayo-Polynesian") mostly retained that system, with a few changes. MP
splits into Western (mainly the PI and much of Indonesia) and Eastern MP, as
well as Oceanic (there still seems to be some debate whether Oceanic is a
primary subgroup of MP, or derives from EMP).
Some Western MP lgs. esp. in the PI, but also Javanese, (again with some
changes) kept the vd/vl stop contrast, nasals and continuants but merged the
uvular/glottals, but most WMP merged the v/vl stops > vl, retaining conts,.
nas. and the single uvular/glottal. As you go further east in Indonesia, some
of the WMP lgs. begin to lose all finals, but retain them in derived (suffixed)
forms. Others, like my SSul group, neutralized finals **ptk, mnN, rls > **t,k,
nN, rls then further neutralized some of the contrasts-- Tae' shows *trls > ?,
k, nN and keeps /trs/ in derived forms (and a lot of incorrect derivs., due to
analogy). Ditto in Bugis, where *tkrls all > ? (/krs/ in derivs with lots of
"wrong" ones) and *nN > N. Other langs in that area lose the all finals
outright, but show a few (often wrong) in derivs.
Eastern MP (most of the Moluccas and western New Guinea) shows two
developments-- (1) outright loss with no restoration in derivs. or (2)
retention of at least some final contrasts by adding a support vowel (either an
echo-V or @)).
Proto Oceanic is reconstructed with *ptk, mnN, rls, ? (thus the argument that
it's most likely directly < MP). AIUI a few _Melanesian_ lgs. still retain some
of the finals, but _all_ have been lost in Polynesia-- though (like some of the
eastern MP lgs.) some crop up in derived forms (again with many "wrong" ones).
I don't know whether there's any PN lang. that loses all finals and does NOT
have remnants in derived forms, though I'd bet there probably is.
It's a fascinating question, and I plan to adapt these developments to my three
families on Cindu-- but it's not down on paper yet :-((((
Messages in this topic (8)
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1g. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "David McCann" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 8:52 am ((PST))
On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:01:28 -0200
Leonardo Castro <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
> final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>
> OTOH, this doesn't happen in Spanish and Italian where "r" is always
> pronounced as an alveolar flap. Is the alveolar flap "stronger" than
> other rhotic phonemes?
>
> Is there any universal tendency which encompasses all these phenomena?
Obviously there's a general tendency to simplify syllables to CV, which
different languages resist to different degrees. And different sounds
show different degrees of resistance. In some cases, that may be
because the sound has a weak articulation, like [h]. In other cases,
the sound is acoustically weak, so children who drop it are less likely
to be corrected.
The trilled /r/ in Italian or the fricative one in Chinese are
obviously stronger than the flap or the approximant, so they show more
resistance.
In Spanish and Portuguese, you have a contrast between strong (trilled)
and weak (flapped): Sp. pero, perro. Since the weak form is final, it's
at risk, as in many parts of Brazil. In Caribbean Spanish, /r/ and /l/
tend to become interchangeable when final: one can hear Puerto Rico
come out as [pwelto]!
The restoration of /r/ in modern French is an example of spelling
pronunciation, and one can also see conservatism in second language
users. When the US became independent, probably the majority had
non-rhotic dialects. The 19th century immigrants pronounced words as
they were written, with -r; except if they *weren't* written, so arse
became ass. A similar case is Malay, which is generally non-rhotic for
first-language speakers, rhotic for second-language speakers.
Messages in this topic (8)
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2a. Re: Koha
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 4:54 am ((PST))
--- On Tue, 2/12/13, Anthony Miles <[email protected]> wrote:
On 2/6/2013 10:49 PM, Anthony Miles wrote:
>> Koha is a German-derived language spoken on the Earth of the
>> "Eis-Lehre-Welt (ELW)" cosm of the Polycosm, the equivalent of all
>> the Pacific Ocean creoles on OTL's Earth. It started as an
>> slow-burning experiment in late 2011 to see how much of German syntax
>> could survive extreme simplification (most of it, as it turns out).
>I like this; it looks vaguely Pacific at first glance, but you can see
>the Germanic roots if you point them out. Interesting though that it
>appears to have /o/ but no /u/. (I'd have expected "muka" for "mother".)
Na mi me'a ka ku 'ena ka voka ho Koha Elopa hi he'a. (It pleases me [schmeckt,
not passt gut] that you can see the words from [European] German.).
RM That was my first impression too. Knowing a bit about Polynesian sound
changes helped,....
/u/ is a phoneme in Koha - the Tosa (pre-Koha) word for "mother" was 'ti muta'.
Rule:
u > o/_Ca#
Note that /e/ does not exhibit this behavior.
RM the u > o/ __Ca# is a common though sporadic change in Oceania. Also true of
i > e /__Ca#. And to top it off, you can also have (sporadic again)
a > o > __Cu# and a > e/__Ci#. Makes cognate-hunting a tricky operation :-)))
The vocabulary of Koha is a bit small, but it was used as a contact language,
so KISS applies.
RM I found it interesting and rather amusing. Years ago, another conlanger and
I tried to devise a Latin-Polynesian language (based on the idea of a lost
Roman trading vessel), but it didn't get very far..... Polynesian sound changes
produced way too many homonyms from the Latin.
Messages in this topic (4)
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3a. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 4:57 am ((PST))
(rejected the other day because I was over my limit....)
--- On Wed, 2/13/13, Matthew Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks for pointing out this study, I read an article about it in Nature,
but the link helped me actually find it. I'm not much for math, but it
looks really cool.
===========================
In
principle it sounds great. But I'm not much for higher math/statistics
either, nor computerese. Consequently _in the article itself_ I really
couldn't understand what they were getting at.
In the
Supplementary material, where they go into the actual protoforms and the
tree diagrams, I'm not impressed. I simply don't get, for ex., their
finding on the word for "wind"-- Fiji "cagi" = /DaNi] has cognate
relatives ALL OVER THE PLACE < AN *haNin
(except for the initial /D/ and the loss of the original final (both
explainable), but they apparently managed to find a couple Oceanic
languages that didn't, and so came up with a weird protoform. And
judging from the way they format their various protoforms, I wonder if
they have any knowledge at all of the established forms, and what all
the various symbols mean.
Another chart in the Supplement
discusses differences between "parent" and "child" langauges, but in
many cases they're the wrong way round, and many of them would be
"obvious upon inspection" to a trained Austronesianist. Nothing new
here.
As for the tree diagrams (in the big circular format) I
strongly suspect they've used trees already devised by traditional
comparative work. One cavil I have is that the nodes are simply
numbered, not labeled, and the numbering doesn't seem to be explained
anywhere.
Unless someone really understands all the jargon etc., I personally
can't imagine how it would be useful in my work..
====================================
There is a part in the paper where they describe how to
build a tree no? page 2 paragraph 7, or did I misunderstand that?
==========================
I'll double check that in the morning.
(TODAY: sorry, I still haven't gotten round to that....)
Messages in this topic (10)
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3b. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 5:15 am ((PST))
On Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:25:30 -0600, Matthew Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote:
>There is a part in the paper where they describe how to
>build a tree no? page 2 paragraph 7, or did I misunderstand that?
No, they're not building the tree there. It's this: the reconstruction
process would be easiest if you had _cognate_ sets in all the languages in
question. If all you have instead is a big multilingual dictionary, then
semantic change and other replacement events mean that some of the
corresponding words won't be cognates. This is what they're talking about in
that paragraph: after you know what the tree is, you'll find that sometimes the
word at one node of the tree is not the regular sound change descendant of its
parent but is just some completely unrelated replacement.
Anyway, I only just noticed the supplementary information part of the paper
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/02/06/1204678110.DCSupplemental/sapp.pdf
so I've got some more reading to do...
Alex
Messages in this topic (10)
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3c. Re: Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 6:46 am ((PST))
--- On Fri, 2/15/13, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
No, they're not building the tree there. It's this: the reconstruction
process would be easiest if you had _cognate_ sets in all the languages in
question. If all you have instead is a big multilingual dictionary, then
semantic change and other replacement events mean that some of the
corresponding words won't be cognates. This is what they're talking about in
that paragraph: after you know what the tree is, you'll find that sometimes the
word at one node of the tree is not the regular sound change descendant of its
parent but is just some completely unrelated replacement.
RM: and that's sort of obvious to anyone, "elementary", isn't it?
Messages in this topic (10)
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4a. Re: OT: Ranking of living intellectuals.
Posted by: "David McCann" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 9:03 am ((PST))
On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:05:37 -0200
Leonardo Castro <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm just curious to know what you think about rankings of intellectual
> people like these:
Rubbish! The first list was compiled by the readers of Foreign Policy:
very authoritative! Richard Dawkins? Not in my book.
Messages in this topic (3)
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5a. Re: Proto-Jardic noun morphology
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 1:12 pm ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
On Friday 15 February 2013 03:39:09 Herman Miller wrote:
> On 2/14/2013 10:06 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> >
> > On Thursday 14 February 2013 05:15:03 Herman Miller wrote:
> >> I'm thinking it might simplify some things if length is distinctive in
> >> Proto-Jardic.
> >
> > Why not? There are many languages where vowel length is
> > distinctive, and even families where it is distinctive in the
> > common ancestor but not in the daughters (e.g., Romance).
>
> It's also a nice contrast with Tirelat, which gained a distinction in
> vowel length (e.g. from compensatory lengthening).
Yes. AFMCL, Classical Old Albic and most Old Albic dialects have
vowel length distinction but Proto-Albic (and Proto-Hesperic)
didn't.
> >> Say that inanimate nouns end in -i or -ī, where short -i
> >>
> >> was lost (*siaḍi-olu> śaṛ-öl) but long -ī remained as -i (*zakī-olu>
> >> zaķi-l). Abstract nouns might have ended in -o, or some other short
> >> vowel that didn't mutate the -o in -olu.
> >
> > That is my opinion, too.
>
> I noticed a similar alternation in verb inflection, where the present
> tense suffix is -ó, but the present tense of the antipassive voice is
> -vö. (This suggests that the fronting of /o/ to /ö/ might have happened
> before the /o/ vs. /ó/ split, unless both /o/ and /ó/ changed to /ö/
> after short /i/.)
Long vowels are often more "tense", i.e. closer to the edges of
the vowel space, and therefore perhaps more resistant against
assimilatory processes. At least, this does not seem implausible
to me. Maybe /o/ was fronted and /o:/ only centralized, which
later shifted back to /o/.
> > That a language is head-initial now doesn't mean it always was.
> > It may have been head-final earlier. Proto-Celtic probably was
> > head-final (at least, Celtiberian was, and so was PIE). My own
> > Proto-Hesperic is also head-final, and while Old Albic is pretty
> > consistently head-initial, the old head-final word order shows
> > in compounds, and in the secondary case endings which evolved
> > from Proto-Hesperic postpositions.
>
> Jarda also has head-final order in compound words, but multiple-word
> compounds are head-initial. (Lindiga is head-initial even within
> compound words, which gets weird when you add suffixes.)
There is this saying, "Today's morphology is yesterday's syntax",
attributed to Thomas Givón (according to Wikipedia, what he
actually said was "Today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology").
Actually, my main reason to have head-final compounds was to
have them nicely play together with suffixes. There really is
nothing wrong with head-initial compounds, but they indeed give
somewhat weird results with suffixes (consider a Spanish word
form such as _tocadiscoses_ 'record players', which has two
plural suffixes in a row).
> >> Modern Jarda has an ordinary trilled /r/ as well, and I'm assuming that
> >> was a trilled alveolar /r/ in Proto-Jardic. But looking at initial
> >> consonant clusters in modern Jarda, it does seem likely that /ṛ/ was
> >> some kind of approximant to begin with. You never see /ṛ/ as the first
> >> consonant in an initial cluster (e.g. *ṛw or *ṛj), which would be
> >> expected if it had been some kind of stop. It could have been a lateral,
> >> but Jarda has enough laterals as it is. Or a tap, like /ɾ/ vs. /r/ in
> >> Spanish.
> >
> > So you have an alveolar and a retroflex rhotic. This *could* be
> > the residue of a merger of an alveolar and a retroflex series (or
> > whatever may have done in the other retroflexes), but that is not
> > necessary. Not knowing the phonology you have in mind, I cannot
> > tell which scenario makes the most sense, though.
>
> Well, it's a sound that really doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the
> Proto-Jardic sounds. The Jarda sound is more like trying to say /j/ with
> your tongue tip curled back than it's anything like an American English
> /r/. When it dissimilates after /r/, it changes to /j/. So I don't know
> that I'd call it a rhotic even though I write it as <ṛ>.
What you describe seems to be a palatalized retroflex approximant.
Certainly an interesting phoneme. Perhaps from a Proto-Jardic
cluster */rj/ or something like that?
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
5b. Re: Proto-Jardic noun morphology
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 2:42 pm ((PST))
IIRC the weak grade of *t used to be a retroflex flap in at least some
Finnish dialects in spite of the normal and strong grades being alveolar
stops. Swedish has a sound much like what Herman describes as a realization
of /rj/. The alveolar/dental approximant resulting from intervocoid /d/ in
Swedish allegro speech is sometimes hard to distinguish from [r\`] not
least before /j/ where approximantization occurs in spite of /j/ normally
being realized as something [z\]-ish. So maybe your palatalized retroflex
approximant arose from [Dj]. I'm also thinking of Latin LL which became
[d`d`] in Southern and insular Italy and in Gascon became /t/ when it ended
up final but /r/ elsewhere. The story about how the arosen homonymy of
CATTUS and GALLUS was variously resolved is a classic BTW. I'm thinking
that maybe your retroflex arose from *rl or Dl.
I second the suggestions that the various case endings arose from an
amalgam of gender markers, case markers and postpositions.
My conlang Sohlob is another example of a head-initial language with a
head-final ancestor. S case endings arose from PS postpositions which were
themselves often case inflected nominals. PS had case but most PS case
endings were lost by phonetic attrition. A main exception is the ergative
ending which arose from an instrumental ending plus a discourse or topic
marker and the accusative (S is split-ergative-accusative) which arose from
the same marker without an instr ending. On top of this S has developed
some prepositions from verbs.
Den fredagen den 15:e februari 2013 skrev Jörg Rhiemeier:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Friday 15 February 2013 03:39:09 Herman Miller wrote:
>
> > On 2/14/2013 10:06 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > > Hallo conlangers!
> > >
> > > On Thursday 14 February 2013 05:15:03 Herman Miller wrote:
> > >> I'm thinking it might simplify some things if length is distinctive in
> > >> Proto-Jardic.
> > >
> > > Why not? There are many languages where vowel length is
> > > distinctive, and even families where it is distinctive in the
> > > common ancestor but not in the daughters (e.g., Romance).
> >
> > It's also a nice contrast with Tirelat, which gained a distinction in
> > vowel length (e.g. from compensatory lengthening).
>
> Yes. AFMCL, Classical Old Albic and most Old Albic dialects have
> vowel length distinction but Proto-Albic (and Proto-Hesperic)
> didn't.
>
> > >> Say that inanimate nouns end in -i or -ī, where short -i
> > >>
> > >> was lost (*siaḍi-olu> śaṛ-öl) but long -ī remained as -i (*zakī-olu>
> > >> zaķi-l). Abstract nouns might have ended in -o, or some other short
> > >> vowel that didn't mutate the -o in -olu.
> > >
> > > That is my opinion, too.
> >
> > I noticed a similar alternation in verb inflection, where the present
> > tense suffix is -ó, but the present tense of the antipassive voice is
> > -vö. (This suggests that the fronting of /o/ to /ö/ might have happened
> > before the /o/ vs. /ó/ split, unless both /o/ and /ó/ changed to /ö/
> > after short /i/.)
>
> Long vowels are often more "tense", i.e. closer to the edges of
> the vowel space, and therefore perhaps more resistant against
> assimilatory processes. At least, this does not seem implausible
> to me. Maybe /o/ was fronted and /o:/ only centralized, which
> later shifted back to /o/.
>
> > > That a language is head-initial now doesn't mean it always was.
> > > It may have been head-final earlier. Proto-Celtic probably was
> > > head-final (at least, Celtiberian was, and so was PIE). My own
> > > Proto-Hesperic is also head-final, and while Old Albic is pretty
> > > consistently head-initial, the old head-final word order shows
> > > in compounds, and in the secondary case endings which evolved
> > > from Proto-Hesperic postpositions.
> >
> > Jarda also has head-final order in compound words, but multiple-word
> > compounds are head-initial. (Lindiga is head-initial even within
> > compound words, which gets weird when you add suffixes.)
>
> There is this saying, "Today's morphology is yesterday's syntax",
> attributed to Thomas Givón (according to Wikipedia, what he
> actually said was "Today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology").
> Actually, my main reason to have head-final compounds was to
> have them nicely play together with suffixes. There really is
> nothing wrong with head-initial compounds, but they indeed give
> somewhat weird results with suffixes (consider a Spanish word
> form such as _tocadiscoses_ 'record players', which has two
> plural suffixes in a row).
>
> > >> Modern Jarda has an ordinary trilled /r/ as well, and I'm assuming
> that
> > >> was a trilled alveolar /r/ in Proto-Jardic. But looking at initial
> > >> consonant clusters in modern Jarda, it does seem likely that /ṛ/ was
> > >> some kind of approximant to begin with. You never see /ṛ/ as the first
> > >> consonant in an initial cluster (e.g. *ṛw or *ṛj), which would be
> > >> expected if it had been some kind of stop. It could have been a
> lateral,
> > >> but Jarda has enough laterals as it is. Or a tap, like /ɾ/ vs. /r/ in
> > >> Spanish.
> > >
> > > So you have an alveolar and a retroflex rhotic. This *could* be
> > > the residue of a merger of an alveolar and a retroflex series (or
> > > whatever may have done in the other retroflexes), but that is not
> > > necessary. Not knowing the phonology you have in mind, I cannot
> > > tell which scenario makes the most sense, though.
> >
> > Well, it's a sound that really doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the
> > Proto-Jardic sounds. The Jarda sound is more like trying to say /j/ with
> > your tongue tip curled back than it's anything like an American English
> > /r/. When it dissimilates after /r/, it changes to /j/. So I don't know
> > that I'd call it a rhotic even though I write it as <ṛ>.
>
> What you describe seems to be a palatalized retroflex approximant.
> Certainly an interesting phoneme. Perhaps from a Proto-Jardic
> cluster */rj/ or something like that?
>
> --
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
> http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
> "Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
>
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
6.1. Re: Field vs armchair linguistics (was:OT YAEPT -omp, -onk_
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 3:07 pm ((PST))
I might have become a field linguist had it not been for my medical
condition. Ultimately I ended up outside academia pursuing lx in my free
time. I've somewhat compensated by developing a keen ear for everyday
phonetics -- boy is there a difference between how ppl speak and how they
think they speak! -- and by being engaged in dialect
preservation/documentation/education on the home turf which may be a worthy
form of moribund language work; just to make ppl take pride in their
heritage rather than seeing it as a bastardized form of the standard
language. I just wish there were more kids using dialect grammar and not
just phone* ics. Being a conlanger has in fact better equipped me to bring
across a better understanding of the relation between dialect and standard.
Describing the standard as a conlang may not be 100% accurate but paves the
way for looking at things from another angle.
/bpj
Den onsdagen den 13:e februari 2013 skrev Dirk Elzinga:
> I agree with what Roger said about field work; there's nothing like it. Of
> course, I don't travel to primitive and exotic locales to do field work
> (unless you consider small towns in the Great Basin and Southeastern Utah
> to be either, or both). But the feeling of cultural dislocation is very
> strong on Indian reservations. That coupled with a traditional mistrust
> (and even active dislike) of white people makes for some tense moments when
> being introduced into a community. [1]
>
> It is true that, of the conlangers that I've met, most have been interested
> in field work. I wonder, though, if it isn't really Field Work they're
> interested in so much as finding out new and unusual things about language.
> Since the bulk of the theoretical work in linguistics that I've seen is
> confined to well known and well documented languages, it may be that
> conlangers, in their search for the weird and exotic, are naturally drawn
> to reference grammars and other products of field work.
>
> Dirk
>
> [1] I attended a meeting of the cultural preservation committee for a tribe
> in which one of the senior members took my presence as an opportunity to
> berate me, as a representative of White People Everywhere, for the losses
> and depredations suffered by his people. Most of the other committee
> members were embarrassed--most, but not all. I ended up not getting a whole
> lot done there, but I did score some pity points and made a couple of good
> friends in the community.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 8:59 AM, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > --- On Tue, 2/12/13, And Rosta <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Sai, On 12/02/2013 02:27:
> > > I'm not a field linguist so I have no idea what the perceptual
> > > distribution is,
> >
> > I'm not a field linguist either. I'm a sworn adherent of armchair
> > linguistics. I do do a bit of field linguistics, but only what can be
> done
> > from the comfort of my own armchair (or classroom). [Discussion topic
> for a
> > new thread: Among professional linguisticians, armchair linguists are
> many
> > and field linguists are few; among conlangers interested in careers or
> > advanced academic studyin linguistics, would-be field linguists are many
> > and would-be armchair linguists are few. How come?]
> >
> > Sai, On 12/02/2013 02:27:
> > > I'm not a field linguist so I have no idea what the perceptual
> > > distribution is,
> >
> > I'm
> > not a field linguist either. I'm a sworn adherent of armchair
> > linguistics. I do do a bit of field linguistics, but only what can be
> > done from the comfort of my own armchair (or classroom).
> > RM-- HaHa. I
> > began as a field linguist but in my ultimate lack of an academic
> > appointment have perforce become an armchair linguist......
> >
> >
> > [Discussion
> > topic for a new thread: Among professional linguisticians, armchair
> > linguists are many and field linguists are few; among conlangers
> > interested in careers or advanced academic study in linguistics,
> > would-be field linguists are many and would-be armchair linguists are
> > few. How come?]
> > ============================================================
> >
> > OK--I'll start it here: Not sure that's
> > entirely accurate. Most academic training in linguistics (as well as
> > Anthropology) will include field work (if only in a "Field Methods"
> > course, where some us catch the bug-- that course shifted my whole
> > academic/intellectual orientation from Romance to Malay-Polynesian!).
> > OTOH most conlangers AFAICT are armchair linguists-- although one could
> > say that inventing a language has certain elements of field linguistics
> >
> > Field
> > work is truly fascinating-- you're not only encountering a whole new
> > language but often a new culture as well (same in a lot of conlanging).
> > It can be rather uncomfortable-- primitive surroundings, weird foods,
> > difficulties relating to the people, or the converse, going a bit
> > "native" ;-) -- and sometimes frustrating when you find variation even
> > with a single small group. Or working with a moribund language, whose
> > speakers are few and elderly, maybe lacking some teeth and having memory
> > problems....
> >
> > Even the SILers, with their religious motivation, would probably confess
> > to some occasional discomfort in their field work.
> >
> > You
> > need a firm grounding in phonetics (even for English! as we discover in
> > these YAEPT threads), and some kind of
> > theoretical underpinning to make sense of the phonology and grammar
> you're
> > discovering. Such field work has formed the basis of many a doctoral
> > dissertation!! (Unless you're Chomsky & Co., who apparently saw no
> > reason to work on anything other than English (so I'm told...))
> >
> > My
> > own field work was done in comfortable surroundings, but if I'd had
> > time, could well have involved some serious trekking into the wilds....
> > At one point early on I thought (with my background in Spanish) that it
> > might be interesting to work on S.American native languages, but an
> > audited Anthro. course under N.Y.Chagnon (of Yanomamo fame) disabused me
> > of that idea.
> >
> > Since becoming an armchair/non-affiliated
> > linguist, I've discovered another problem: something I'd spent several
> > years writing,
> > and considered worth publishing, was rejected on the basis that it was
> > based only on book research, not on actual field work. Bah humbug. I
> > could have pointed out that one of the early stars in the MP field,
> > Renward Brandstetter, never did field work AFAIK, yet managed to do
> > important work from published sources....(Like Einstein, he clerked in
> > some Swiss govt. office.)
> >
> > So let's see what sort of di
Messages in this topic (47)
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