FW: Histling-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 7

Roger Lass lass at iafrica.com
Sun Dec 2 10:05:06 UTC 2012


Right, it is in fact whichever prefix ge-, if they’re not all instance of the perfective. I was a bit sloppy there. Shouldn’t answer emails at night.

 

The loss of –n in strong past participles is very variable, and many verbs have two forms, depending on region or style. Thus the famous got/gotten, in my speech hid ~ hidden (rarely), but in the rest of the class I strong verbs a lot of unpredictability, bite/bitten drive/driven but shit(e)/shit, never *shitten as far as I know in any modern variety, though Chaucer uses it as an attributive (I think the line is ‘A clene shepherd and a shitten shepe’), though it was around at least as late as the `14th century. These may not be properly morphologically conditioned sound changes but rather retweakings of morphology. The general behaviour of different affixes, even if phonologically the same, can show differences, and one or more change affecting the same segment-type can occur in the same text.

 

The point about loss of –n in nasal-stem class III verbs is interesting; I’d never noticed that before.

R

 

From: Martin Huld [mailto:ylfenn at earthlink.net] 
Sent: 02 December 2012 11:33 AM
To: Roger Lass; histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] FW: Histling-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 7

 

There is also OE genoh > ME ynow, ynogh > NE enough and OE gewis > ME ywis 'surely'; these would seem to indicate that the conditioning factor was phonological, ie in unstressed syllables immediately before a stressed syllable.  While most of these examples would come from the perfect participles, there were other instances.  

Consider the fate of OE final [n].  It was lost in NE (and already in ONorthumbrian and OFris.) in the infinitive and the nominative plural of n-stem nouns; OE writan > NE write; naman > NE name; but it is partially preserved in the perfect participle OE (ge)writen, (ge)giefen  > NE written, given.  OFris.  writa, nama, Now it is certainly subject to later deletion if there is another [n] in the stem ie OE (ge)funden, gesungen > NE found, sung.   

-----Original Message----- 
From: Roger Lass 
Sent: Dec 1, 2012 4:36 AM 
To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu 
Subject: [Histling-l] FW: Histling-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 7 




 

 

From: Guillaume Jacques [mailto:rgyalrongskad at gmail.com] 
Sent: 01 December 2012 01:57 PM
To: Roger Lass
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] Histling-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 7

 

Dear professor Lass,

 

I think that your message was sent only to me, you may need to send it again to the list histling-l at mailman.rice.edu

 

Best regards,

 

Guillaume Jacques

2012/12/1 Roger Lass <lass at iafrica.com>

Just another remark on something that might belong here. There is a change that occurs in many Middle English dialects, where the OE past participle prefix ge- [je] < [i], spelled i or y. It can also delete, but when it remains after about the 13th century it occurs only in that form. It persists variably up to at least the 17th century, usually spelled y, as in yclept ‘called’ < OE ge-cleopod. No other instances of [je] do this as far as I know, so the change is not only restricted to a particular morphological category but to one member of the category. There are also cases of metathesis and epenthesis in Middle English restricted only to two lexical items, and at least one sound change in Irish that is restricted to one item. I can provide references on those two cases if anybody is interested.

RL

 

From: histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Guillaume Jacques
Sent: 01 December 2012 01:34 PM
To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] Histling-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 7

 

 

 

I would be very grateful for any discussion of this or advice on
treatments of this question in literature.

 

This phonetic change in Nahuatl is discussed by Campbell and Langacker 1978, part II (in International Journal of American Linguistics), p.201, ft 43. I think that they were the first to propose a morphological conditioning for the loss of initial *p- (preservation only in verbs and some kinship terms, because they are generally prefixed and therefore *p is not word-initial in at least part of the paradigm).

 

 

 

-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://xiang.free.fr
 http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/export_listeperso_xml.php?url_id=0000000003849





 

-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://xiang.free.fr
 http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/export_listeperso_xml.php?url_id=0000000003849

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