rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Javier Martinez wrote:
 
[LT]
 
> > But some sound changes are quite irreversible.  Consider loss.  In the
> > ancestor of Greek, prevocalic */s/ was lenited to /h/, and the resulting
> > /h/ was later lost.  I predict confidently that the Greeks will never
> > reverse this change by re-introducing those long-gone /s/s,
>
> yes. as a product of analogy, see the -s- futures etc.
 
Yes, agreed, except that specialists do not seem to be sure whether /s/
was first lost from futures like <luso> (from <luo> `loosen') and then
restored by analogy, or whether it was never lost in the first place
because of paradigmatic pressure to retain it.  As usual, we cannot tell
without textual evidence whether we are looking at an instance of
analogical restoration or at an instance of analogical preservation.
 
Analogical preservation is quite well attested.  For example, some of
the Finnic languages have lost word-final /n/ in all cases *except*
where that /n/ was the sole marker of a grammatical category, in which
case it has been retained.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk