From sw271 at cam.ac.uk  Thu Feb  1 11:49:58 2001
From: sw271 at cam.ac.uk (Dr S. Watts)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 06:49:58 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
In-Reply-To: <4FBA57D5178@fs1.art.man.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.1.FEB.2001.064958.EST.SW271@CAM.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
--On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 8:04 am +0000 "Debra.Ziegeler"
<Debra.P.Ziegeler at man.ac.uk> wrote:

> Years later, I observe that speakers of Mandarin Chinese whose first
> languages are Cantonese or Hokkien sometimes pronounce the /hw/  in
> words such as 'huai' ('spoilt, bad') as /w/, and am reminded by a
> Taiwanese colleague, Lien Chinfa,  that once the /hw/ was there in
> English too. No way to stop change.
>
> Debra Ziegeler

I think we've been round the /hw/ block before, but for anyone else who
thinks it was there in English 'once', I can assure you that it is alive
and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information
is inadequate. I have seen a small English child cause total confusion by
announcing that he 'loved animals, and had done a project on wales at
school'.

Sheila Watts

___________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
University Lecturer in German
G06 Kennedy Building
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
Telephone +44-1223-335816


From william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu  Thu Feb  1 21:39:29 2001
From: william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu (William C. Spruiell)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 16:39:29 EST
Subject: Wh-words
Message-ID: <THU.1.FEB.2001.163929.EST.WILLIAM.C.SPRUIELL@CMICH.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey," creating
a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
well.

I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between the
/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.

-- Bill Spruiell


From john.bowden at anu.edu.au  Fri Feb  2 12:30:13 2001
From: john.bowden at anu.edu.au (John Bowden)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:30:13 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073013.EST.JOHN.BOWDEN@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I was interested in Larry Trask's notes on Lazza as a version of his name.
The process is very productive in Australian English: some of us here have
actually assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
linguistics students.

Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:

You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:

Larry -> Lazza
Barry -> Bazza
Marian -> Mazza
Warren -> Wazza
Caroline -> Cazza, etc...

Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have digraph
/ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Kevin Tuite writes:
>
> >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
> >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel is
"Nezz"
> >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
>
> Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is 'Larry',
> and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British friends.
> My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz' or 'Mazza'.
> The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly referred to as
> 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye -- though I doubt that
> his friends call him this.
>
> I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered Australian
> 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
>
> Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are not
> young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of ourselves
> as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think -- especially
> in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only occasionally
> updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife, who watches
> Frasier and ER.
>
> When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words like
> 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years later, my
> mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the /h/ in these
> words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".  But now I've
> been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague, and she tells
> me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be "pretentious".
>
> I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
> change.
>
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
> Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Feb  2 12:33:37 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:33:37 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073337.EST.LARRYT@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Sheila Watts writes:

>  I think we've been round the /hw/ block before, but for anyone else who
>  thinks it was there in English 'once', I can assure you that it is alive
>  and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
>  that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information
>  is inadequate. I have seen a small English child cause total confusion by
>  announcing that he 'loved animals, and had done a project on wales at
>  school'.

Yes; I've had this experience too.  Last year an administrator came
to talk to me about my department's work.  At one point she asked me
whether what I was telling her about had anything to do with "that
recent work on Wales".  I was wholly at sea for some moments, even
after a repetition, until it finally struck me that she was talking
about whales.


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr  Fri Feb  2 12:33:59 2001
From: jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr (=?Windows-1252?Q?Mate_Kapovi=E6?=)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:33:59 EST
Subject: Wh-words
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073359.EST.JOZO.KAPOVIC@ZG.TEL.HR>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: William C. Spruiell <william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu>
To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Date: 2001. veljaèa 02 02:02
Subject: Re: Wh-words


>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
>west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey,"
creating
>a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
>living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
>noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
>well.
>
>I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between
the
>/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
>"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.
>
>-- Bill Spruiell


I don't think that wh- in "whiskey" is etymological since it's supposed to
come originally from Irish uisce "water" and not from a PIE *kw- -starting
word like why/where etc.


From ylfenn at earthlink.net  Fri Feb  2 21:14:04 2001
From: ylfenn at earthlink.net (Martin E HULD)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:14:04 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.161404.EST.YLFENN@EARTHLINK.NET>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I am a native speaker of Kurath's Dialect 10, and although a number of
school teachers tried to enforce (in those days educators assumed they knew
right from wrong) the why/Y, which/witch distinction, it was entirely gone
from actual speech by all natives in the small coal mining towns of Western
Pennsylvania where I grew up, both in my generation and in the speech of
those from the earlier years of the twentieth century.  Nevertheless, I do
believe that I am sensitive to its presence in the speech of others.  I was
therefore amazed to hear a colleague a few years older than I, now in her
early fifties and raised in Red Creek NY, distinguish whether/weather but
fail to distinguish whale/wail; I then listened more closely and heard
[hwith] not [with].  It seems in her speech that the [hw]/[w] contrast was
generalized to function words but lost in nouns and verbs.  Has anyone else
noticed this or a similar pattern?

A second point, a number of texts, eg O'Grady et all. Contemporary
Linguistics symbolize [hw] as a unit phoneme with IPA inverse-w.
Historically, this is a poor choice since by the same w-deletion rule that
governs sword and two, we have an h-pronunciation for who and unetymological
whore; moreover, the Ayenbit of Inwit consistently represents initial PG [f]
by <u> (uerste = first) and PG [s] by <z> (zalt = salt), but [hw] or [xw] is
<hu> (huer = where; huich = which).  Therefore, despite Campbell (Old
English Grammar p. 20) who takes hw (and hl, hr, and hn) as digraphs of
voiceless segments, it seems best to regard them as clusters at least in Old
and Middle English.  I think the same is true of New English where whine is
parallel to swine and twine [hwajn, swajn twajn] in which there is an
initial voiceless segment which partially devoices the following glide.
Additionally, treating <why>, presuming you have it in your dialect, as
[hwaj] in contrast to [waj] (<Y>) is parallel to treating hue [hjuw] versus
yew [juw] as a case of an initial cluster.

I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of phonemically
distinct <wh> in American dialects.

Martin E HULD


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Fri Feb  2 21:11:38 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:11:38 EST
Subject: Wh-words
In-Reply-To: <001401c08d0f$48e0ece0$32861dc3@219.205.255.5>
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.161138.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> >I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
> >west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey,"
> creating
> >a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
> >living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
> >noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
> >well.
> >
> >I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between
> the
> >/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
> >"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.
> >
> >-- Bill Spruiell
>
>
> I don't think that wh- in "whiskey" is etymological since it's supposed to
> come originally from Irish uisce "water" and not from a PIE *kw- -starting
> word like why/where etc.
> [Mate Kapovic']


Yes, the <wh> in <whiskey> is not etymological, as is evident not
only from Irish <uisce> and Scottish Gaelic <uisge> but from the
earlier Scots forms <usquebae>, <usquebaugh>, etc.
Nonetheless, the _Scottish National Dictionary_ shows the symbol
for a voiceless labiovelar approximant (or however one wants to
characterize it) in the pronunciation of this word.  Also, the
northeast Scots form of the word has been recorded as <fuskie>,
with the regular realization of orthographic <wh-> as [f] in this
dialect.  I don't know of any explanation for this irregularity, but
perhaps a Scots specialist could come up with something.

Jim Rader


From enl097 at abdn.ac.uk  Fri Feb  2 14:22:03 2001
From: enl097 at abdn.ac.uk (Robert McColl Millar)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 09:22:03 EST
Subject: /hw/ and whisky
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.092203.EST.ENL097@ABDN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Whether or not the <wh> in _whisky_ is 'etymological' or not, it
is still pronounced -- at the very least -- as an unvoiced
semi-vowel (possibly with a velar fricative preceding)in my
(Western) dialect of Scots. I might be a bit suspicious of this
being a spelling pronunciation, along the lines of /hw/ in
_whelk_, which older Scots would call a _wulk_, if it were not for
the fact that here, in the North-East, _whisky_ is tradionally in
line with all other <wh> words in being pronounced with initial
/f/ -- perhaps under Gaelic influence.



----------------------
Robert McColl Millar
University of Aberdeen
Scotland
enl097 at abdn.ac.uk


From mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk  Sat Feb  3 18:04:26 2001
From: mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk (Richard Hogg)
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:04:26 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <004a01c08b3d$4c76e4a0$5895cb96@jbowden>
Message-ID: <SAT.3.FEB.2001.130426.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
OK for Oz perhaps, but how do you handle "Gazza" the name of the
tearful footballer, Paul Gascoigne?

Richard

On 2 Feb 2001, at 7:30, John Bowden wrote:

> ----------------------------Original
> message---------------------------- I was interested in Larry Trask's
> notes on Lazza as a version of his name. The process is very
> productive in Australian English: some of us here have actually
> assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
> linguistics students.
>
> Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:
>
> You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
> second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
> syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:
>
> Larry -> Lazza
> Barry -> Bazza
> Marian -> Mazza
> Warren -> Wazza
> Caroline -> Cazza, etc...
>
> Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have
> digraph /ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.
>
> John
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
> Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far
>
>
> > ----------------------------Original
> > message---------------------------- Kevin Tuite writes:
> >
> > >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
> > >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel
> > >  is
> "Nezz"
> > >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
> >
> > Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is
> > 'Larry', and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British
> > friends. My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz'
> > or 'Mazza'. The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly
> > referred to as 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye --
> > though I doubt that his friends call him this.
> >
> > I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered
> > Australian 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
> >
> > Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are
> > not young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of
> > ourselves as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think --
> > especially in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only
> > occasionally updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife,
> > who watches Frasier and ER.
> >
> > When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words
> > like 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years
> > later, my mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the
> > /h/ in these words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".
> > But now I've been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague,
> > and she tells me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be
> > "pretentious".
> >
> > I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
> > change.
> >
> >
> > Larry Trask
> > COGS
> > University of Sussex
> > Brighton BN1 9QH
> > UK
> >
> > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
> >
> > Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> > Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
> >


*********************************************************
Richard Hogg
1 Ollerbarrow Road
Hale, Altrincham
Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
**********************************************************


From mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk  Sat Feb  3 18:06:40 2001
From: mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk (Richard Hogg)
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:06:40 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
In-Reply-To: <200102022015.MAA27138@gull.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <SAT.3.FEB.2001.130640.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On 2 Feb 2001, at 16:14, Martin E HULD wrote:

> ----------------------------Original
> message----------------------------

<snip>

But Campbell's view on h-clusters is not universally accepted, thus
both Luick and Kuhn (Language, 1970) speak against him, so too my
own book. See also Dobson for the later language. And of course
most early Scots writers use the trigraph <quh> or something similar
for <wh>, which doesn't help to explain whisky. Personally I blame
the drink.

Richard Hogg

> A second point, a number of texts, eg O'Grady et all. Contemporary
> Linguistics symbolize [hw] as a unit phoneme with IPA inverse-w.
> Historically, this is a poor choice since by the same w-deletion rule
> that governs sword and two, we have an h-pronunciation for who and
> unetymological whore; moreover, the Ayenbit of Inwit consistently
> represents initial PG [f] by <u> (uerste = first) and PG [s] by <z>
> (zalt = salt), but [hw] or [xw] is <hu> (huer = where; huich = which).
>  Therefore, despite Campbell (Old English Grammar p. 20) who takes hw
> (and hl, hr, and hn) as digraphs of voiceless segments, it seems best
> to regard them as clusters at least in Old and Middle English.  I
> think the same is true of New English where whine is parallel to swine
> and twine [hwajn, swajn twajn] in which there is an initial voiceless
> segment which partially devoices the following glide. Additionally,
> treating <why>, presuming you have it in your dialect, as [hwaj] in
> contrast to [waj] (<Y>) is parallel to treating hue [hjuw] versus yew
> [juw] as a case of an initial cluster.
>
> I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
> inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of
> phonemically distinct <wh> in American dialects.
>
> Martin E HULD


*********************************************************
Richard Hogg
1 Ollerbarrow Road
Hale, Altrincham
Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
**********************************************************


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Feb  4 23:42:54 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 18:42:54 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <SUN.4.FEB.2001.184254.EST.LARRYT@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Martin Huld writes:

>  I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
>  inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of phonemically
>  distinct <wh> in American dialects.

I've encountered a number of speakers who retain /hw/ -- both
American and Scottish, with the odd Irish speaker.  I've asked them
for their intuitions about the status of /hw/, and I've discovered
that they split about equally into two groups.

One group is certain that /hw/ is a cluster, consisting of /h/
followed by /w/.  The other group is equally certain that /hw/
is a single consonant, distinct from all other consonants, and
not a cluster at all.

Since I belong to the first group, and since the cluster analysis
is historically correct, I was startled the first time I met
a member of the second group, but I've met more of them since
then, and there's no doubt that some people's intuitions are
quite clear on this point: one consonant, a voiceless [w].


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk  Mon Feb  5 12:20:11 2001
From: nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk (nigel vincent)
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 07:20:11 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <3A7C186F.4912.2F290A@localhost>
Message-ID: <MON.5.FEB.2001.072011.EST.NBVINT@NESSIE.MCC.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I don't knowm the answer to Richard's question but I would note that Sharon
also falls under John Bowden's rule. Hence the fact that at the time when
Gascoigne's girlfriend was called Sharon and was in the news for displaying
her underwear, one newspaper ran the inimitable headline: "Gazza's Shazza
hazza new brazza"!
Nigel

 >----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>OK for Oz perhaps, but how do you handle "Gazza" the name of the
>tearful footballer, Paul Gascoigne?
>
>Richard
>
>On 2 Feb 2001, at 7:30, John Bowden wrote:
>
>> ----------------------------Original
>> message---------------------------- I was interested in Larry Trask's
>> notes on Lazza as a version of his name. The process is very
>> productive in Australian English: some of us here have actually
>> assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
>> linguistics students.
>>
>> Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:
>>
>> You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
>> second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
>> syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:
>>
>> Larry -> Lazza
>> Barry -> Bazza
>> Marian -> Mazza
>> Warren -> Wazza
>> Caroline -> Cazza, etc...
>>
>> Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have
>> digraph /ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.
>>
>> John
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>> To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
>> Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far
>>
>>
>> > ----------------------------Original
>> > message---------------------------- Kevin Tuite writes:
>> >
>> > >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
>> > >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel
>> > >  is
>> "Nezz"
>> > >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
>> >
>> > Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is
>> > 'Larry', and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British
>> > friends. My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz'
>> > or 'Mazza'. The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly
>> > referred to as 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye --
>> > though I doubt that his friends call him this.
>> >
>> > I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered
>> > Australian 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
>> >
>> > Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are
>> > not young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of
>> > ourselves as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think --
>> > especially in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only
>> > occasionally updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife,
>> > who watches Frasier and ER.
>> >
>> > When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words
>> > like 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years
>> > later, my mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the
>> > /h/ in these words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".
>> > But now I've been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague,
>> > and she tells me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be
>> > "pretentious".
>> >
>> > I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
>> > change.
>> >
>> >
>> > Larry Trask
>> > COGS
>> > University of Sussex
>> > Brighton BN1 9QH
>> > UK
>> >
>> > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>> >
>> > Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
>> > Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>> >
>
>
>*********************************************************
>Richard Hogg
>1 Ollerbarrow Road
>Hale, Altrincham
>Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
>Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
>**********************************************************


Nigel Vincent                  Tel: +44-(0)161-275 3194
Department of Linguistics      Fax: +44-(0)161-275 3187
University of Manchester       e-mail: nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk
Manchester M13 9PL              http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Html/NBV/
UK                               Visit our web-page:
                                http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Feb  5 14:59:35 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 09:59:35 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <l03102803b6a449db0470@[130.88.58.79]> from "nigel vincent" at
 Feb 05, 2001 07:20:11 AM
Message-ID: <MON.5.FEB.2001.095935.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:

Jeremy > Jez
Miriam > Miz
Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)

The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.

It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
with /l/, as in:

Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
Derek > Del

Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
Maybe there's an age factor.

On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.

Richard Coates

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From bls at socrates.Berkeley.EDU  Tue Feb  6 19:54:23 2001
From: bls at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Andrew Simpson)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 14:54:23 EST
Subject: BLS 27 Announcement
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.145423.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


The 27th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
        Friday, February 16 - Sunday, February 18, 2001
                   Berkeley, California


****************************************************
INVITED SPEAKERS - Parasession on LANGUAGE & GESTURE
****************************************************

SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
 'The Two Faces of Gesture'

SCOTT LIDDELL, GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY
 'Grammar and Gesture in American Sign Language: implications
        for constructing meaning'

SUSAN DUNCAN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
 'Perspectives on the co-expressivity of speech and co-speech gestures in
        three languages'

****************************************************
INVITED SPEAKERS - General Session
****************************************************

LEONARD TALMY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, BUFFALO
 'The Representation of Spatial Structure in Spoken vs. Signed Languages'

ELISABETH SELKIRK, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST
  TBA

SARAH THOMASON, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 'Pronoun Borrowing'



The complete schedule of talks may be found at:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/bls27sched.html


Registration information:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/register27.html







Questions?  Please contact:
..............................
Berkeley Linguistics Society
1203 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone/Fax: 510-642-5808

find information on BLS meetings and availability of proceedings at:
http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/
..............................


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:51:20 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:51:20 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010206081347.00c12a90@saluki-mail.siu.edu> from
 "Geoffrey S. Nathan" at Feb 06, 2001 08:41:55 AM
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.125120.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Sorry, I didn't mean for one moment to suggest that this was a phonetic
change. Geoff Nathan may well be near the mark, but it's of some residual
interest that both the inserted consonants /l/ and /z/ are voiced coronals.

Richard


>
> At 09:59 AM 2/5/2001 -0500, Richard Coates wrote:
> >On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
> >of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with
 the
> >surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
>
> I've been following the discussion with some interest, although I admit to
> never having heard the -za suffixes myself.  But, even though I'm a
> phonologist by profession, I don't think that /r/ > /z/ is the right way to
> think about what's going on here.  That is, I don't think the /r/ somehow
> became a /z/.  Let me engage in some idle speculation.
> I suspect that the thin edge of the wedge with this innovation was the 's'
> hypocoristic (as in Yags, probably also 'bags'--'I file a claim on').  We
> are presumably talking about an r-less dialect, which would make things
> like [haer] for Harriman unpronounceable (unlike, say, Al for Alan).  There
> are probably minimality effects here--a preference for names that are at
> least a metric foot long (not unlike hot dogs, I guess ;-) ), so there is
> felt a need for an empty schwa to make the name 'big' enough.  So probably
> the route is:
>
> laeri > *laer > laez (by suffixation) > laez@ (by insertion of an empty
> nucleus)
>
> A possible analogy might be with various hypocoristic formations based on
> Margaret.  Common ones are, of course, Maggie (again, note absence of /r/),
> but I've also heard Mags.
>
> Apologies for taking a wild, unreferenced swing here (I'm sure there's lots
> written on Margaret/Maggie/etc.), but I thought I'd toss in my tupenny
 worth...
>
> Geoff
>
>
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Department of Linguistics
> Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
> Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
> Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
>          (618) 549-0106 (Home)
>                                                          geoffn at siu.edu
>
>

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From geoffn at siu.edu  Tue Feb  6 17:50:43 2001
From: geoffn at siu.edu (Geoffrey S. Nathan)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:50:43 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.125043.EST.GEOFFN@SIU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 09:59 AM 2/5/2001 -0500, Richard Coates wrote:
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.

I've been following the discussion with some interest, although I admit to
never having heard the -za suffixes myself.  But, even though I'm a
phonologist by profession, I don't think that /r/ > /z/ is the right way to
think about what's going on here.  That is, I don't think the /r/ somehow
became a /z/.  Let me engage in some idle speculation.
I suspect that the thin edge of the wedge with this innovation was the 's'
hypocoristic (as in Yags, probably also 'bags'--'I file a claim on').  We
are presumably talking about an r-less dialect, which would make things
like [haer] for Harriman unpronounceable (unlike, say, Al for Alan).  There
are probably minimality effects here--a preference for names that are at
least a metric foot long (not unlike hot dogs, I guess ;-) ), so there is
felt a need for an empty schwa to make the name 'big' enough.  So probably
the route is:

laeri > *laer > laez (by suffixation) > laez@ (by insertion of an empty
nucleus)

A possible analogy might be with various hypocoristic formations based on
Margaret.  Common ones are, of course, Maggie (again, note absence of /r/),
but I've also heard Mags.

Apologies for taking a wild, unreferenced swing here (I'm sure there's lots
written on Margaret/Maggie/etc.), but I thought I'd toss in my tupenny worth...

Geoff



Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
         (618) 549-0106 (Home)
                                                         geoffn at siu.edu


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:41:05 2001
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:41:05 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.124105.EST.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


I think it has certainly generalized a bit.
At least, my son has taken to referring to the BBC Programme
"Newsnight", featuring Jeremy Paxman, as "The Jezza Pazza Show".
                                        RW


On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Richard Coates wrote:

>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
>/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:
>
>Jeremy > Jez
>Miriam > Miz
>Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)
>
>The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.
>
>It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
>with /l/, as in:
>
>Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
>Derek > Del
>
>Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
>Maybe there's an age factor.
>
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
>
>Richard Coates
>
>--
>Richard Coates
>School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
>University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
>
>Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
>Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
>Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
>Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html
>


From sw271 at cam.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:40:49 2001
From: sw271 at cam.ac.uk (Dr S. Watts)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:40:49 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.124049.EST.SW271@CAM.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
--On Mon, Feb 5, 2001 9:59 am +0000 Richard Coates
<richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the
> /r/ with /l/, as in:
>
> Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez
> too) Derek > Del

Rarer in contemporary English, but commoner historically:
Henry - Harry - Hal
Mary - Molly - Moll (and Polly - Poll)
Dorothy - Dolly - Doll
Sarah - Sally - Sal.

Presumably the clip yielding a final -r is unsatisfactory for speakers of
non-rhotic varieties of English. But why or when the change from
predominantly -l to predominantly -z/-s, I don't know.

Sheila Watts
___________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
University Lecturer in German
G06 Kennedy Building
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
Telephone +44-1223-335816


From msharpe at metz.une.edu.au  Tue Feb  6 17:30:00 2001
From: msharpe at metz.une.edu.au (Margaret Sharpe)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:30:00 EST
Subject: wh
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.123000.EST.MSHARPE@METZ.UNE.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I started school 1939 in Sydney on the middle North Shore, and I remember
noticing the wh sound and its contrast with w, and am fairly confident I
made the difference while in primary school, but it dropped out later.

Margaret Sharpe


From faber at alvin.haskins.yale.edu  Tue Feb  6 17:29:36 2001
From: faber at alvin.haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:29:36 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.122936.EST.FABER@ALVIN.HASKINS.YALE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 9:59 AM -0500 2/5/2001, Richard Coates wrote:


>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
>/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:
>
>Jeremy > Jez
>Miriam > Miz
>Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)
>
>The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.
>
>It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
>with /l/, as in:
>
>Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
>Derek > Del

I don't know how widespread this is, but how about Hal as a nickname for
Harold?

>Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
>Maybe there's an age factor.
>
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
--
Alice Faber                                       tel. (203) 865-6163
Haskins Laboratories                              fax  (203) 865-8963
270 Crown St                                   faber at haskins.yale.edu
New Haven, CT 06511                               afaber at wesleyan.edu


From clolynam at gofree.indigo.ie  Wed Feb  7 12:36:11 2001
From: clolynam at gofree.indigo.ie (Clodagh Lynam)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:36:11 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073611.EST.CLOLYNAM@GOFREE.INDIGO.IE>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Hallo Histlingers

I am a Hiberno-English speaker, born and raised in Dublin.
I have been teaching phonetics at tutorial level since 1987.
In my experience, there are very few Hiberno-English speakers who
do *not* distinguish between 'wh-' and 'w-'.  However, my son, who was
also born and raised in Dublin and is now 16, made no distinction until he
was about 8 or 9 years old - what to make of that??

I am fairly sure that I pronounce 'wh-' as a cluster, with lip-rounding on
the 'h'. Could it be simply that there is variation between speakers - some
having a
cluster and some not? I'm a syntactician, not a phonologist, but is there
not some
way of measuring these things?


----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2001 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: wh-clusters


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Martin Huld writes:
>
> >  I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
> >  inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of
phonemically
> >  distinct <wh> in American dialects.
>
> I've encountered a number of speakers who retain /hw/ -- both
> American and Scottish, with the odd Irish speaker.  I've asked them
> for their intuitions about the status of /hw/, and I've discovered
> that they split about equally into two groups.
>
> One group is certain that /hw/ is a cluster, consisting of /h/
> followed by /w/.  The other group is equally certain that /hw/
> is a single consonant, distinct from all other consonants, and
> not a cluster at all.
>
> Since I belong to the first group, and since the cluster analysis
> is historically correct, I was startled the first time I met
> a member of the second group, but I've met more of them since
> then, and there's no doubt that some people's intuitions are
> quite clear on this point: one consonant, a voiceless [w].
>
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
> Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>


From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au  Wed Feb  7 12:36:30 2001
From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:36:30 EST
Subject: New publication on Polynesian historical linguistics
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073630.EST.MALCOLM.ROSS@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
PACIFIC LINGUISTICS is happy to announce the publication of the
second (and final) volume of the Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics

Prices are in Australian dollars (one Australian dollar is currently
equivalent to about US$ 0,55.).

Orders may be placed by mail, e-mail or telephone with:

The Publications Administrator
Pacific Linguistics
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra   ACT   0200   Australia

Tel:    +61 (0)2 6249 2742
Fax:  +61 (0)2 6249 4896

mailto://jmanley at coombs.anu.edu.au


Credit card orders are accepted.

For our catalogue and other materials, see:

http://pacling.anu.edu.au (under construction)

_______________________________________________________________
SICOL Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Oceanic
Linguistics:  Vol. 2,  Historical and descriptive studies

Palmer, Bill and Paul Geraghty (eds)

PL 505

In July 1995 the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, played host
to the Second International Conference on Oceanic Languages, or SICOL - the
second in a successful series of international conferences devoted to the
main language family of the South Pacific, the Oceanic branch of the large
Austronesian stock.

A special session of the conference was devoted to contact languages, and a
number of papers from that session have already been published by Pacific
Linguistics as the first volume of the proceedings.  This second and final
volume contains a selection of papers dealing with Oceanic languages
themselves.  The nineteen papers presented here range from descriptive
studies of the morphology, syntax or lexicon of individual languages
through work on subgrouping to aspects of Proto Oceanic.

        Together these papers give a taste of the diversity of
Oceanic languages
and the range of research carried out on this important language
family. A list of contents is given below.

2000    ISBN 0 85883 476 6
AUS $93.00      ($85.00)
_______________________________________________________________

Part 1:  Proto Oceanic studies

1 Star, wind, and wave: searching for early Oceanic navigation terms
Meredith Osmond

2 Where did suli come from? A study of the words connected to taro
    plants in Oceanic languages
Ritsuko Kikusawa

3 The true prepositions/casemarkers in Proto Oceanic
Joseph C. Finney


Part 2:  Languages of Melanesia

4 Sit, stand, lie: posture verbs and imperfectives
Robert Early

5 'Come' and 'go' in Kilivila
Gunter Senft

6 Roviana clauses
Evelyn M. Todd

7 Linguistic subgrouping in Vanuatu and New Caledonia
John Lynch

8 How did Erromangan verbs get so messy?
Terry Crowley

9 'Adjectives' in Tamambo, Malo: syntactic variation, semantic and
    discourse correlation
Dorothy Jauncey

10 Some Raga vocabulary for terrestrial invertebrates, reptiles and
    mammals of North Pentecost
D.S. Walsh, Richard Leona, Wendy Pond

11 Postmodification and the structure of relatives in Nêlêmwa and other
    Kanak languages of New Caledonia
Isabelle Bril

12 Un exemple de morphosyntaxe en Nengone (Nouvelle-Caledonie):
    les variations morphologiques et la transitivité
R. Davel Cawa

Part 3:  Central Pacific languages

13 Two be's or not two be's? On the copulas of Wayan Fijian
Andrew Pawley

14 The dialects of the Yasawa Islands of Fiji
Geraldine Triffitt

15 Kuhane and 'aitu. Two cognate Polynesian terms which exclude
    each other
Horst Cain and Annette Bierbach

16 Cia-words in Tokelauan
Even Hovdhaugen

17 Ergative case avoidance in East Futunan (Efu)
Claire Moyse-Faurie

18 Gahua he tohi vagahau Niue: Niue dictionary project: orthography and
    vowel quality


From enl097 at abdn.ac.uk  Wed Feb  7 12:39:00 2001
From: enl097 at abdn.ac.uk (Robert McColl Millar)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:39:00 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073900.EST.ENL097@ABDN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
There's a problem in seeing the Henry > Hal formation as being due to
non-Rhotic speakers. At the time when this phenomenon was still
productive (I'm thinking here of novels such as _Moll Flanders_ and
earlier), we assume that /r/ was still pronounced in these positions in
all dialects of English.
        I lived in London in the late eighties, at the time when Terry
Venables, the football manager, was coaching a Spanish side (Barcelona,
I think). The tabloids took great pleasure from referring to him as 'El
Tel'. I think I always assumed that this /l/ phenomenon was due to (a)
the fact that in South-East English dialects there is often no front
allophone of /l/, even before front vowels and (b) the subsequent
vocalisation of /l/, leading to confusion with /w/ (a similar
phenomenon to one found in many Scots dialects). I had thought that the
third part of this was that /r/ was no longer pronounced in similar
contexts, and was therefore capable of confusion. I based this on the
fact that so many people from the South-East have no /r/ at all,
apparently having /w/ instead -- a 'speech defect' elsewhere, but
perhaps a genuine sound change there due to lack of use of /r/.
        This idea is somewhat put on its head if the /r/ /l/ variation
predates the loss of /r/ medially and finally, however.

Robert Millar
University of Aberdeen

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:40:49 EST "Dr S. Watts" <sw271 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> --On Mon, Feb 5, 2001 9:59 am +0000 Richard Coates
> <richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the
> > /r/ with /l/, as in:
> >
> > Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez
> > too) Derek > Del
>
> Rarer in contemporary English, but commoner historically:
> Henry - Harry - Hal
> Mary - Molly - Moll (and Polly - Poll)
> Dorothy - Dolly - Doll
> Sarah - Sally - Sal.
>
> Presumably the clip yielding a final -r is unsatisfactory for speakers of
> non-rhotic varieties of English. But why or when the change from
> predominantly -l to predominantly -z/-s, I don't know.
>
> Sheila Watts
> ___________________________________________________
> Dr Sheila Watts
> University Lecturer in German
> G06 Kennedy Building
> Newnham College
> Cambridge CB3 9DF
> Telephone +44-1223-335816

----------------------
Robert McColl Millar
enl097 at abdn.ac.uk


From Susan.Fitzmaurice at NAU.EDU  Wed Feb  7 19:02:39 2001
From: Susan.Fitzmaurice at NAU.EDU (Susan M. Fitzmaurice)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 14:02:39 EST
Subject: non-postvocalic /r/
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.140239.EST.SUSAN.FITZMAURICE@NAU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Colleagues,

Can you suggest some good recent historical studies of changes in
non-postvocalic /r/? I'm posting this for a morphologist colleague.  I'd be
jolly grateful for any pointers.

Susan Fitzmaurice
Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
English Department, Box 6032
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-6032
tel: (520) 523-9649
fax: (520) 523-7074


From faber at haskins.yale.edu  Wed Feb  7 19:04:46 2001
From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 14:04:46 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
In-Reply-To: <002901c090b4$5e94d8a0$57dc7dc2@jvzej>
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.140446.EST.FABER@HASKINS.YALE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Clodagh Lynam wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Hallo Histlingers
>
>I am a Hiberno-English speaker, born and raised in Dublin.
>I have been teaching phonetics at tutorial level since 1987.
>In my experience, there are very few Hiberno-English speakers who
>do *not* distinguish between 'wh-' and 'w-'.  However, my son, who was
>also born and raised in Dublin and is now 16, made no distinction until he
>was about 8 or 9 years old - what to make of that??

I can find absolutely nothing on my bookshelf to back this up, but my
gut feeling is that 'wh' might simply be a late-acquired sound. The
only chart I can find of order of phonological acquisition, from a
British, source, goes up through age 4 1/2 or so; but there are other
sounds that some kids don't fully control until their second or third
year of primary school (r/w contrast, l, s/th, etc), and it wouldn't
surprise me to find 'wh' in that group.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203) 865-8963


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Feb  8 01:34:25 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 20:34:25 EST
Subject: Celtic voices, English places
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.203425.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze

Celtic voices, English places

Pub.: Shaun Tyas (1 High St., Donington, Spalding, Lincolnshire PE11
4TA, UK)

2000

Pp. xiv + 433

ISBN 1 900289 41 5

Price GBP 30

Contains 69 essays on English place-names, an introduction, gazetteer
and maps. The main theme is the survival of Brittonic names for places in
modestly larger numbers than hitherto believed; some Irish names in England
are also treated.

Richard Coates

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From bwarvik at abo.fi  Thu Feb  8 13:45:09 2001
From: bwarvik at abo.fi (Brita Warvik)
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 08:45:09 EST
Subject: historical discourse linguistics conference
Message-ID: <THU.8.FEB.2001.084509.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Apologies for duplicate postings

ORGANIZATION IN DISCOURSE II: The Historical Perspective

Announcing an international conference on historical discourse
linguistics and pragmatics to be held in Turku, Finland, August 7-11,
2002.  The invited speakers are Laurel Brinton, Andreas Jucker,
Françoise Salager-Meyer, and Irma Taavitsainen.

An advance notice for the conference has been posted at
http://www.utu.fi/hum/engfil/oid2002.html
The chairman of the Organizing Committee is Risto Hiltunen, Professor of

the English Department at the University of Turku.

The First Circular and a Call for Papers will be published in the summer

of 2001. Please contact us to be included in our mailing list.

E-mail:         oid2002 at utu.fi

On behalf of the Organizing Committee,

Brita Warvik
Department of English, Abo Akademi University
Turku, Finland


From cecil at cecilward.com  Tue Feb 13 12:53:24 2001
From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 07:53:24 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <E14Ndvd-00043K-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.13.FEB.2001.075324.EST.CECIL@CECILWARD.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask wrote

> Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is 'Larry',
and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British friends.
My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz' or 'Mazza'.
The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly referred to as
'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye -- though I doubt that
his friends call him this.

> I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered Australian
'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.

There are a couple of interesting issues here. What strikes me about the "-a" ending which is a familiarity/informality marker is how quickly it became productive following the rise of its use by the English media in connection with "Gazza" for Paul Gascoigne, a footballer. "Hezza" suddenly appeared shortly afterwards. A year or two later, I was astonished to hear my wife, a singer, mention that she was due to perform "Mozza req." (Mozart's requiem!). I find it amazing that this process was so rapid.

Around the same time, my wife was referring to her friend Marion as "Mazza" too.

And so here we have a case of word "shape" becoming a carrier of semantic baggage, coming to carry a connotation of the speaker's familiarity with or affection for the referent. Makes you think about cases where, say, a new diminutive affix emerges.


From cecil at cecilward.com  Tue Feb 13 12:54:05 2001
From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 07:54:05 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
In-Reply-To: <1174991.3190008259@swatts.newn.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.13.FEB.2001.075405.EST.CECIL@CECILWARD.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
An earlier contributor said:

>I can assure you that it is alive and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information is inadequate.


And this accords with my experience of the various types of English I hear spoken here in the formerly Norse/Gaelic speaking Isle of Skye, Scotland. It seems to be true both for the English of Gaelic speakers and for that of English-monoglot highlanders.

Would anyone care to comment on the relationship between the modern regional distribution of /w/ vs /hw/ in Britain, and also Norwegian vs Swedish, say, and the old Germanic dialectal distributions?

Since another correspondant mentioned Gaelic, here's an aside: What happened to /hw-/ and /w-/ in these parts? Answer, they gave rise to /k-/ and /b/-words.

When English loans were taken into Gaelic in earlier centuries, the process of naturalisation had to deal with /hw/ and /w/, which, although both being present in Gaelic, may not occur in initial position in unmutated (radical, base) words. The solution was that all the English /hw/-words produced /k-/ and all the /w/-words /b-/. Hence
        "wall" ->       Gaelic "balla"
        "win" ->        Gaelic "buinnig"

        "wheel" ->      Gaelic "cuibhle" /k at jl@/        (where the @-sign is supposed to be a schwa)
        "whip" ->       Gaelic "cuip" /k at jhp/
        "The Whigs" ->  Gaelic "A' Chuigse" /@ xwIgs'@/

The two sounds of English therefore sounded very different to Gaelic ears.

The /h/ in /hw/, could occur in initial position, but only as a result of the grammatical initial mutation lenition, so it was analyzed as being the result of an assumed initial /k/ lenited to /x/ and realised as [h]. The /w/ in /hw/ was analyzed either as /u/ or taken as a labialised allophonic variant.

As for /w/-, neither could initial /w/ occur other as the result of a grammatical initial mutation, in this case from an assumed radical /b/ > grammatically lenited to produce /<beta>/ realised as <beta> / [w] / [v].

This is now part of history. In more recent times, increased exposure to English brought a new tolerance of English /w-/, giving a new process where /w-/ was loaned as /u-/ or /w-/. Example: "ueir" /we:r'/ (<"wire").


From w.croft at man.ac.uk  Fri Feb 23 18:02:04 2001
From: w.croft at man.ac.uk (Bill Croft)
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:02:04 EST
Subject: "Explaining Language Change"
Message-ID: <FRI.23.FEB.2001.130204.EST.W.CROFT@MAN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I would like to announce that my book "Explaining Language
Change" is finally available outside the UK---it is now listed as
available at a major Internet bookseller, listed at US$22
paperback (the UK price is 19.99 pounds).

I am sending this announcement because the publisher (Longman)
was bought up by Pearson, who terminated linguistics
publication, is not marketing their recent linguistics books, and
has not answered correspondence.

I have appended the jacket description of the book. My apologies
to those who receive multiple copies of this announcement.

Bill Croft


"Explaining Language Change"
William Croft, University of Manchester
ISBN 0-582-35677-6 (paperback), June 2000. Pp. xvi, 287.

Ever since the origins of both linguistics and evolutionary
biology in the 19th century, scholars have noted the similarity
between biological evolution and language change. Yet until
recently neither linguists nor biologists have developed a model
of evolution general enough to apply across the two fields. Even
in linguistics, the field is split between the historical
linguists who study change in language structure, and the
sociolinguists who study social variation in the speech
community.

"Explaining language change" represents the first thoroughly
worked out framework for language evolution, building on the
pioneering ideas of Richard Dawkins and David Hull in biology
and philosophy of science. Its central thesis is that the locus
of language change is the utterance in social intercourse.
Linguistic innovations emerge from the remarkable complexity of
communication in social interaction. Once innovations occur,
they are propagated through the equally complex social
structures of the speech communities we participate in.

"Explaining language change" provides a framework for assessing
current theories of language change, and advances new ideas
about grammatical reanalysis, conventional and nonconventional
use of language, the structure of speech communities, language
mixing, and the notion of "progress" in language change.
"Explaining language change" reintegrates sociolinguistics and
historical linguistics, weaving together research on grammatical
change, pragmatics, social variation, language contact and
genetic linguistics.


From brp3 at psu.edu  Tue Feb 27 17:36:27 2001
From: brp3 at psu.edu (Richard Page)
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 12:36:27 EST
Subject: call, Germanic philology and linguistics
Message-ID: <TUE.27.FEB.2001.123627.EST.BRP3@PSU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION 2001 CONVENTION
Germanic Philology Discussion Group
New Orleans, Louisiana
27-30 December 2001

Deadline for Abstracts:  March 15, 2001

The Germanic Philology Discussion Group will be holding a meeting at the
2001 MLA Convention in New Orleans. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute
talks in all areas of Germanic linguistics and philology. Please send
1-page abstracts and queries to:

Richard Page
Penn State University
311 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
email: brp3 at psu.edu


From sw271 at cam.ac.uk  Thu Feb  1 11:49:58 2001
From: sw271 at cam.ac.uk (Dr S. Watts)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 06:49:58 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
In-Reply-To: <4FBA57D5178@fs1.art.man.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.1.FEB.2001.064958.EST.SW271@CAM.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
--On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 8:04 am +0000 "Debra.Ziegeler"
<Debra.P.Ziegeler at man.ac.uk> wrote:

> Years later, I observe that speakers of Mandarin Chinese whose first
> languages are Cantonese or Hokkien sometimes pronounce the /hw/  in
> words such as 'huai' ('spoilt, bad') as /w/, and am reminded by a
> Taiwanese colleague, Lien Chinfa,  that once the /hw/ was there in
> English too. No way to stop change.
>
> Debra Ziegeler

I think we've been round the /hw/ block before, but for anyone else who
thinks it was there in English 'once', I can assure you that it is alive
and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information
is inadequate. I have seen a small English child cause total confusion by
announcing that he 'loved animals, and had done a project on wales at
school'.

Sheila Watts

___________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
University Lecturer in German
G06 Kennedy Building
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
Telephone +44-1223-335816


From william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu  Thu Feb  1 21:39:29 2001
From: william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu (William C. Spruiell)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 16:39:29 EST
Subject: Wh-words
Message-ID: <THU.1.FEB.2001.163929.EST.WILLIAM.C.SPRUIELL@CMICH.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey," creating
a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
well.

I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between the
/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.

-- Bill Spruiell


From john.bowden at anu.edu.au  Fri Feb  2 12:30:13 2001
From: john.bowden at anu.edu.au (John Bowden)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:30:13 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073013.EST.JOHN.BOWDEN@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I was interested in Larry Trask's notes on Lazza as a version of his name.
The process is very productive in Australian English: some of us here have
actually assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
linguistics students.

Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:

You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:

Larry -> Lazza
Barry -> Bazza
Marian -> Mazza
Warren -> Wazza
Caroline -> Cazza, etc...

Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have digraph
/ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Kevin Tuite writes:
>
> >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
> >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel is
"Nezz"
> >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
>
> Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is 'Larry',
> and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British friends.
> My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz' or 'Mazza'.
> The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly referred to as
> 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye -- though I doubt that
> his friends call him this.
>
> I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered Australian
> 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
>
> Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are not
> young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of ourselves
> as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think -- especially
> in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only occasionally
> updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife, who watches
> Frasier and ER.
>
> When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words like
> 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years later, my
> mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the /h/ in these
> words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".  But now I've
> been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague, and she tells
> me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be "pretentious".
>
> I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
> change.
>
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
> Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Feb  2 12:33:37 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:33:37 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073337.EST.LARRYT@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Sheila Watts writes:

>  I think we've been round the /hw/ block before, but for anyone else who
>  thinks it was there in English 'once', I can assure you that it is alive
>  and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
>  that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information
>  is inadequate. I have seen a small English child cause total confusion by
>  announcing that he 'loved animals, and had done a project on wales at
>  school'.

Yes; I've had this experience too.  Last year an administrator came
to talk to me about my department's work.  At one point she asked me
whether what I was telling her about had anything to do with "that
recent work on Wales".  I was wholly at sea for some moments, even
after a repetition, until it finally struck me that she was talking
about whales.


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr  Fri Feb  2 12:33:59 2001
From: jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr (=?Windows-1252?Q?Mate_Kapovi=E6?=)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:33:59 EST
Subject: Wh-words
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.073359.EST.JOZO.KAPOVIC@ZG.TEL.HR>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: William C. Spruiell <william.c.spruiell at cmich.edu>
To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Date: 2001. velja?a 02 02:02
Subject: Re: Wh-words


>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
>west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey,"
creating
>a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
>living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
>noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
>well.
>
>I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between
the
>/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
>"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.
>
>-- Bill Spruiell


I don't think that wh- in "whiskey" is etymological since it's supposed to
come originally from Irish uisce "water" and not from a PIE *kw- -starting
word like why/where etc.


From ylfenn at earthlink.net  Fri Feb  2 21:14:04 2001
From: ylfenn at earthlink.net (Martin E HULD)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:14:04 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.161404.EST.YLFENN@EARTHLINK.NET>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I am a native speaker of Kurath's Dialect 10, and although a number of
school teachers tried to enforce (in those days educators assumed they knew
right from wrong) the why/Y, which/witch distinction, it was entirely gone
from actual speech by all natives in the small coal mining towns of Western
Pennsylvania where I grew up, both in my generation and in the speech of
those from the earlier years of the twentieth century.  Nevertheless, I do
believe that I am sensitive to its presence in the speech of others.  I was
therefore amazed to hear a colleague a few years older than I, now in her
early fifties and raised in Red Creek NY, distinguish whether/weather but
fail to distinguish whale/wail; I then listened more closely and heard
[hwith] not [with].  It seems in her speech that the [hw]/[w] contrast was
generalized to function words but lost in nouns and verbs.  Has anyone else
noticed this or a similar pattern?

A second point, a number of texts, eg O'Grady et all. Contemporary
Linguistics symbolize [hw] as a unit phoneme with IPA inverse-w.
Historically, this is a poor choice since by the same w-deletion rule that
governs sword and two, we have an h-pronunciation for who and unetymological
whore; moreover, the Ayenbit of Inwit consistently represents initial PG [f]
by <u> (uerste = first) and PG [s] by <z> (zalt = salt), but [hw] or [xw] is
<hu> (huer = where; huich = which).  Therefore, despite Campbell (Old
English Grammar p. 20) who takes hw (and hl, hr, and hn) as digraphs of
voiceless segments, it seems best to regard them as clusters at least in Old
and Middle English.  I think the same is true of New English where whine is
parallel to swine and twine [hwajn, swajn twajn] in which there is an
initial voiceless segment which partially devoices the following glide.
Additionally, treating <why>, presuming you have it in your dialect, as
[hwaj] in contrast to [waj] (<Y>) is parallel to treating hue [hjuw] versus
yew [juw] as a case of an initial cluster.

I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of phonemically
distinct <wh> in American dialects.

Martin E HULD


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Fri Feb  2 21:11:38 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:11:38 EST
Subject: Wh-words
In-Reply-To: <001401c08d0f$48e0ece0$32861dc3@219.205.255.5>
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.161138.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> >I learned the /hw-/ forms on words like "why" and "where" as a child in
> >west-central Alabama, but did not learn it on words like "whiskey,"
> creating
> >a sort of split (although I did learn the /hw-/ form on "whale"). When
> >living for a while in the western (mountainous) part of North Carolina, I
> >noticed that the /hw-/ had been retained (or reinvented?) in "whiskey" as
> >well.
> >
> >I'm left wondering if there are general patterns of interactions between
> the
> >/hw/ vs. /w/ neutralization and the status of individual lexemes as
> >"wh-words" vs. regular nouns, etc.
> >
> >-- Bill Spruiell
>
>
> I don't think that wh- in "whiskey" is etymological since it's supposed to
> come originally from Irish uisce "water" and not from a PIE *kw- -starting
> word like why/where etc.
> [Mate Kapovic']


Yes, the <wh> in <whiskey> is not etymological, as is evident not
only from Irish <uisce> and Scottish Gaelic <uisge> but from the
earlier Scots forms <usquebae>, <usquebaugh>, etc.
Nonetheless, the _Scottish National Dictionary_ shows the symbol
for a voiceless labiovelar approximant (or however one wants to
characterize it) in the pronunciation of this word.  Also, the
northeast Scots form of the word has been recorded as <fuskie>,
with the regular realization of orthographic <wh-> as [f] in this
dialect.  I don't know of any explanation for this irregularity, but
perhaps a Scots specialist could come up with something.

Jim Rader


From enl097 at abdn.ac.uk  Fri Feb  2 14:22:03 2001
From: enl097 at abdn.ac.uk (Robert McColl Millar)
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 09:22:03 EST
Subject: /hw/ and whisky
Message-ID: <FRI.2.FEB.2001.092203.EST.ENL097@ABDN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Whether or not the <wh> in _whisky_ is 'etymological' or not, it
is still pronounced -- at the very least -- as an unvoiced
semi-vowel (possibly with a velar fricative preceding)in my
(Western) dialect of Scots. I might be a bit suspicious of this
being a spelling pronunciation, along the lines of /hw/ in
_whelk_, which older Scots would call a _wulk_, if it were not for
the fact that here, in the North-East, _whisky_ is tradionally in
line with all other <wh> words in being pronounced with initial
/f/ -- perhaps under Gaelic influence.



----------------------
Robert McColl Millar
University of Aberdeen
Scotland
enl097 at abdn.ac.uk


From mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk  Sat Feb  3 18:04:26 2001
From: mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk (Richard Hogg)
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:04:26 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <004a01c08b3d$4c76e4a0$5895cb96@jbowden>
Message-ID: <SAT.3.FEB.2001.130426.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
OK for Oz perhaps, but how do you handle "Gazza" the name of the
tearful footballer, Paul Gascoigne?

Richard

On 2 Feb 2001, at 7:30, John Bowden wrote:

> ----------------------------Original
> message---------------------------- I was interested in Larry Trask's
> notes on Lazza as a version of his name. The process is very
> productive in Australian English: some of us here have actually
> assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
> linguistics students.
>
> Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:
>
> You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
> second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
> syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:
>
> Larry -> Lazza
> Barry -> Bazza
> Marian -> Mazza
> Warren -> Wazza
> Caroline -> Cazza, etc...
>
> Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have
> digraph /ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.
>
> John
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
> Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far
>
>
> > ----------------------------Original
> > message---------------------------- Kevin Tuite writes:
> >
> > >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
> > >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel
> > >  is
> "Nezz"
> > >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
> >
> > Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is
> > 'Larry', and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British
> > friends. My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz'
> > or 'Mazza'. The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly
> > referred to as 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye --
> > though I doubt that his friends call him this.
> >
> > I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered
> > Australian 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
> >
> > Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are
> > not young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of
> > ourselves as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think --
> > especially in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only
> > occasionally updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife,
> > who watches Frasier and ER.
> >
> > When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words
> > like 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years
> > later, my mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the
> > /h/ in these words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".
> > But now I've been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague,
> > and she tells me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be
> > "pretentious".
> >
> > I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
> > change.
> >
> >
> > Larry Trask
> > COGS
> > University of Sussex
> > Brighton BN1 9QH
> > UK
> >
> > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
> >
> > Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> > Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
> >


*********************************************************
Richard Hogg
1 Ollerbarrow Road
Hale, Altrincham
Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
**********************************************************


From mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk  Sat Feb  3 18:06:40 2001
From: mfceprh at fs1.art.man.ac.uk (Richard Hogg)
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:06:40 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
In-Reply-To: <200102022015.MAA27138@gull.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <SAT.3.FEB.2001.130640.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On 2 Feb 2001, at 16:14, Martin E HULD wrote:

> ----------------------------Original
> message----------------------------

<snip>

But Campbell's view on h-clusters is not universally accepted, thus
both Luick and Kuhn (Language, 1970) speak against him, so too my
own book. See also Dobson for the later language. And of course
most early Scots writers use the trigraph <quh> or something similar
for <wh>, which doesn't help to explain whisky. Personally I blame
the drink.

Richard Hogg

> A second point, a number of texts, eg O'Grady et all. Contemporary
> Linguistics symbolize [hw] as a unit phoneme with IPA inverse-w.
> Historically, this is a poor choice since by the same w-deletion rule
> that governs sword and two, we have an h-pronunciation for who and
> unetymological whore; moreover, the Ayenbit of Inwit consistently
> represents initial PG [f] by <u> (uerste = first) and PG [s] by <z>
> (zalt = salt), but [hw] or [xw] is <hu> (huer = where; huich = which).
>  Therefore, despite Campbell (Old English Grammar p. 20) who takes hw
> (and hl, hr, and hn) as digraphs of voiceless segments, it seems best
> to regard them as clusters at least in Old and Middle English.  I
> think the same is true of New English where whine is parallel to swine
> and twine [hwajn, swajn twajn] in which there is an initial voiceless
> segment which partially devoices the following glide. Additionally,
> treating <why>, presuming you have it in your dialect, as [hwaj] in
> contrast to [waj] (<Y>) is parallel to treating hue [hjuw] versus yew
> [juw] as a case of an initial cluster.
>
> I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
> inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of
> phonemically distinct <wh> in American dialects.
>
> Martin E HULD


*********************************************************
Richard Hogg
1 Ollerbarrow Road
Hale, Altrincham
Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
**********************************************************


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Feb  4 23:42:54 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 18:42:54 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <SUN.4.FEB.2001.184254.EST.LARRYT@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Martin Huld writes:

>  I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
>  inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of phonemically
>  distinct <wh> in American dialects.

I've encountered a number of speakers who retain /hw/ -- both
American and Scottish, with the odd Irish speaker.  I've asked them
for their intuitions about the status of /hw/, and I've discovered
that they split about equally into two groups.

One group is certain that /hw/ is a cluster, consisting of /h/
followed by /w/.  The other group is equally certain that /hw/
is a single consonant, distinct from all other consonants, and
not a cluster at all.

Since I belong to the first group, and since the cluster analysis
is historically correct, I was startled the first time I met
a member of the second group, but I've met more of them since
then, and there's no doubt that some people's intuitions are
quite clear on this point: one consonant, a voiceless [w].


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk  Mon Feb  5 12:20:11 2001
From: nbvint at nessie.mcc.ac.uk (nigel vincent)
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 07:20:11 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <3A7C186F.4912.2F290A@localhost>
Message-ID: <MON.5.FEB.2001.072011.EST.NBVINT@NESSIE.MCC.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I don't knowm the answer to Richard's question but I would note that Sharon
also falls under John Bowden's rule. Hence the fact that at the time when
Gascoigne's girlfriend was called Sharon and was in the news for displaying
her underwear, one newspaper ran the inimitable headline: "Gazza's Shazza
hazza new brazza"!
Nigel

 >----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>OK for Oz perhaps, but how do you handle "Gazza" the name of the
>tearful footballer, Paul Gascoigne?
>
>Richard
>
>On 2 Feb 2001, at 7:30, John Bowden wrote:
>
>> ----------------------------Original
>> message---------------------------- I was interested in Larry Trask's
>> notes on Lazza as a version of his name. The process is very
>> productive in Australian English: some of us here have actually
>> assigned problems based on this naming practice to introductory
>> linguistics students.
>>
>> Here's the (as far as I can tell) completely productive rule:
>>
>> You take a name that has stress on the first syllable and in which the
>> second syllable starts with /r/.  Chop off everything after the first
>> syllable and replace it with -zza.  Thus:
>>
>> Larry -> Lazza
>> Barry -> Bazza
>> Marian -> Mazza
>> Warren -> Wazza
>> Caroline -> Cazza, etc...
>>
>> Not sure why so many English names that fulfill the criteria have
>> digraph /ae/ as the stressed vowel, but there you are.
>>
>> John
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>> To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:00 AM
>> Subject: Re: Yags: the story thus far
>>
>>
>> > ----------------------------Original
>> > message---------------------------- Kevin Tuite writes:
>> >
>> > >  Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
>> > >  prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel
>> > >  is
>> "Nezz"
>> > >  (mentioned by Jasmin Harvey).
>> >
>> > Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is
>> > 'Larry', and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British
>> > friends. My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz'
>> > or 'Mazza'. The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly
>> > referred to as 'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye --
>> > though I doubt that his friends call him this.
>> >
>> > I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered
>> > Australian 'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.
>> >
>> > Of course, my friends and I, like the editors of Private Eye, are
>> > not young people -- though I doubt most of us would think of
>> > ourselves as '80s people.  I'm more of a '50s person, I think --
>> > especially in my deeply fossilized American English, which is only
>> > occasionally updated by new Americanisms passed on to me by my wife,
>> > who watches Frasier and ER.
>> >
>> > When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words
>> > like 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years
>> > later, my mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the
>> > /h/ in these words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".
>> > But now I've been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague,
>> > and she tells me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be
>> > "pretentious".
>> >
>> > I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
>> > change.
>> >
>> >
>> > Larry Trask
>> > COGS
>> > University of Sussex
>> > Brighton BN1 9QH
>> > UK
>> >
>> > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>> >
>> > Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
>> > Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>> >
>
>
>*********************************************************
>Richard Hogg
>1 Ollerbarrow Road
>Hale, Altrincham
>Cheshire WA15 9PW            Tel:   +44 (0)161 941 1931
>Great Britain                email: r.m.hogg at man.ac.uk
>**********************************************************


Nigel Vincent                  Tel: +44-(0)161-275 3194
Department of Linguistics      Fax: +44-(0)161-275 3187
University of Manchester       e-mail: nigel.vincent at man.ac.uk
Manchester M13 9PL              http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Html/NBV/
UK                               Visit our web-page:
                                http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Feb  5 14:59:35 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 09:59:35 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <l03102803b6a449db0470@[130.88.58.79]> from "nigel vincent" at
 Feb 05, 2001 07:20:11 AM
Message-ID: <MON.5.FEB.2001.095935.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:

Jeremy > Jez
Miriam > Miz
Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)

The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.

It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
with /l/, as in:

Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
Derek > Del

Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
Maybe there's an age factor.

On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.

Richard Coates

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From bls at socrates.Berkeley.EDU  Tue Feb  6 19:54:23 2001
From: bls at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Andrew Simpson)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 14:54:23 EST
Subject: BLS 27 Announcement
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.145423.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


The 27th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
        Friday, February 16 - Sunday, February 18, 2001
                   Berkeley, California


****************************************************
INVITED SPEAKERS - Parasession on LANGUAGE & GESTURE
****************************************************

SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
 'The Two Faces of Gesture'

SCOTT LIDDELL, GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY
 'Grammar and Gesture in American Sign Language: implications
        for constructing meaning'

SUSAN DUNCAN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
 'Perspectives on the co-expressivity of speech and co-speech gestures in
        three languages'

****************************************************
INVITED SPEAKERS - General Session
****************************************************

LEONARD TALMY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, BUFFALO
 'The Representation of Spatial Structure in Spoken vs. Signed Languages'

ELISABETH SELKIRK, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST
  TBA

SARAH THOMASON, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 'Pronoun Borrowing'



The complete schedule of talks may be found at:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/bls27sched.html


Registration information:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/register27.html







Questions?  Please contact:
..............................
Berkeley Linguistics Society
1203 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone/Fax: 510-642-5808

find information on BLS meetings and availability of proceedings at:
http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS/
..............................


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:51:20 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:51:20 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010206081347.00c12a90@saluki-mail.siu.edu> from
 "Geoffrey S. Nathan" at Feb 06, 2001 08:41:55 AM
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.125120.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Sorry, I didn't mean for one moment to suggest that this was a phonetic
change. Geoff Nathan may well be near the mark, but it's of some residual
interest that both the inserted consonants /l/ and /z/ are voiced coronals.

Richard


>
> At 09:59 AM 2/5/2001 -0500, Richard Coates wrote:
> >On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
> >of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with
 the
> >surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
>
> I've been following the discussion with some interest, although I admit to
> never having heard the -za suffixes myself.  But, even though I'm a
> phonologist by profession, I don't think that /r/ > /z/ is the right way to
> think about what's going on here.  That is, I don't think the /r/ somehow
> became a /z/.  Let me engage in some idle speculation.
> I suspect that the thin edge of the wedge with this innovation was the 's'
> hypocoristic (as in Yags, probably also 'bags'--'I file a claim on').  We
> are presumably talking about an r-less dialect, which would make things
> like [haer] for Harriman unpronounceable (unlike, say, Al for Alan).  There
> are probably minimality effects here--a preference for names that are at
> least a metric foot long (not unlike hot dogs, I guess ;-) ), so there is
> felt a need for an empty schwa to make the name 'big' enough.  So probably
> the route is:
>
> laeri > *laer > laez (by suffixation) > laez@ (by insertion of an empty
> nucleus)
>
> A possible analogy might be with various hypocoristic formations based on
> Margaret.  Common ones are, of course, Maggie (again, note absence of /r/),
> but I've also heard Mags.
>
> Apologies for taking a wild, unreferenced swing here (I'm sure there's lots
> written on Margaret/Maggie/etc.), but I thought I'd toss in my tupenny
 worth...
>
> Geoff
>
>
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Department of Linguistics
> Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
> Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
> Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
>          (618) 549-0106 (Home)
>                                                          geoffn at siu.edu
>
>

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From geoffn at siu.edu  Tue Feb  6 17:50:43 2001
From: geoffn at siu.edu (Geoffrey S. Nathan)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:50:43 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.125043.EST.GEOFFN@SIU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 09:59 AM 2/5/2001 -0500, Richard Coates wrote:
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.

I've been following the discussion with some interest, although I admit to
never having heard the -za suffixes myself.  But, even though I'm a
phonologist by profession, I don't think that /r/ > /z/ is the right way to
think about what's going on here.  That is, I don't think the /r/ somehow
became a /z/.  Let me engage in some idle speculation.
I suspect that the thin edge of the wedge with this innovation was the 's'
hypocoristic (as in Yags, probably also 'bags'--'I file a claim on').  We
are presumably talking about an r-less dialect, which would make things
like [haer] for Harriman unpronounceable (unlike, say, Al for Alan).  There
are probably minimality effects here--a preference for names that are at
least a metric foot long (not unlike hot dogs, I guess ;-) ), so there is
felt a need for an empty schwa to make the name 'big' enough.  So probably
the route is:

laeri > *laer > laez (by suffixation) > laez@ (by insertion of an empty
nucleus)

A possible analogy might be with various hypocoristic formations based on
Margaret.  Common ones are, of course, Maggie (again, note absence of /r/),
but I've also heard Mags.

Apologies for taking a wild, unreferenced swing here (I'm sure there's lots
written on Margaret/Maggie/etc.), but I thought I'd toss in my tupenny worth...

Geoff



Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
         (618) 549-0106 (Home)
                                                         geoffn at siu.edu


From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:41:05 2001
From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:41:05 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.124105.EST.ROGER.WRIGHT@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


I think it has certainly generalized a bit.
At least, my son has taken to referring to the BBC Programme
"Newsnight", featuring Jeremy Paxman, as "The Jezza Pazza Show".
                                        RW


On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Richard Coates wrote:

>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
>/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:
>
>Jeremy > Jez
>Miriam > Miz
>Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)
>
>The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.
>
>It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
>with /l/, as in:
>
>Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
>Derek > Del
>
>Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
>Maybe there's an age factor.
>
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
>
>Richard Coates
>
>--
>Richard Coates
>School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
>University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
>
>Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
>Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
>Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
>Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html
>


From sw271 at cam.ac.uk  Tue Feb  6 17:40:49 2001
From: sw271 at cam.ac.uk (Dr S. Watts)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:40:49 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.124049.EST.SW271@CAM.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
--On Mon, Feb 5, 2001 9:59 am +0000 Richard Coates
<richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the
> /r/ with /l/, as in:
>
> Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez
> too) Derek > Del

Rarer in contemporary English, but commoner historically:
Henry - Harry - Hal
Mary - Molly - Moll (and Polly - Poll)
Dorothy - Dolly - Doll
Sarah - Sally - Sal.

Presumably the clip yielding a final -r is unsatisfactory for speakers of
non-rhotic varieties of English. But why or when the change from
predominantly -l to predominantly -z/-s, I don't know.

Sheila Watts
___________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
University Lecturer in German
G06 Kennedy Building
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
Telephone +44-1223-335816


From msharpe at metz.une.edu.au  Tue Feb  6 17:30:00 2001
From: msharpe at metz.une.edu.au (Margaret Sharpe)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:30:00 EST
Subject: wh
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.123000.EST.MSHARPE@METZ.UNE.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I started school 1939 in Sydney on the middle North Shore, and I remember
noticing the wh sound and its contrast with w, and am fairly confident I
made the difference while in primary school, but it dropped out later.

Margaret Sharpe


From faber at alvin.haskins.yale.edu  Tue Feb  6 17:29:36 2001
From: faber at alvin.haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber)
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:29:36 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
In-Reply-To: <E14PlUw-0001HR-00@rsunz.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.6.FEB.2001.122936.EST.FABER@ALVIN.HASKINS.YALE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 9:59 AM -0500 2/5/2001, Richard Coates wrote:


>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>The strategy of replacing the /r/ of a name truncated to end in /r/ with
>/z(@)/ isn't restricted to names with stressed /ae/ in the UK. I've heard:
>
>Jeremy > Jez
>Miriam > Miz
>Laurence > Loz (conflict, Larry!)
>
>The generalization seems to involve a short V in V1 position.
>
>It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the /r/
>with /l/, as in:
>
>Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez too)
>Derek > Del

I don't know how widespread this is, but how about Hal as a nickname for
Harold?

>Now I come to think of it, all the people I know so called are over about 55!
>Maybe there's an age factor.
>
>On the age front, when is the first /r/ > /z/ that people know of? I am aware
>of someone with the surname Harriman being called /haez@/ and another with the
>surname Farrar /faez/ around 1960-4.
--
Alice Faber                                       tel. (203) 865-6163
Haskins Laboratories                              fax  (203) 865-8963
270 Crown St                                   faber at haskins.yale.edu
New Haven, CT 06511                               afaber at wesleyan.edu


From clolynam at gofree.indigo.ie  Wed Feb  7 12:36:11 2001
From: clolynam at gofree.indigo.ie (Clodagh Lynam)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:36:11 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073611.EST.CLOLYNAM@GOFREE.INDIGO.IE>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Hallo Histlingers

I am a Hiberno-English speaker, born and raised in Dublin.
I have been teaching phonetics at tutorial level since 1987.
In my experience, there are very few Hiberno-English speakers who
do *not* distinguish between 'wh-' and 'w-'.  However, my son, who was
also born and raised in Dublin and is now 16, made no distinction until he
was about 8 or 9 years old - what to make of that??

I am fairly sure that I pronounce 'wh-' as a cluster, with lip-rounding on
the 'h'. Could it be simply that there is variation between speakers - some
having a
cluster and some not? I'm a syntactician, not a phonologist, but is there
not some
way of measuring these things?


----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2001 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: wh-clusters


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Martin Huld writes:
>
> >  I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
> >  inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of
phonemically
> >  distinct <wh> in American dialects.
>
> I've encountered a number of speakers who retain /hw/ -- both
> American and Scottish, with the odd Irish speaker.  I've asked them
> for their intuitions about the status of /hw/, and I've discovered
> that they split about equally into two groups.
>
> One group is certain that /hw/ is a cluster, consisting of /h/
> followed by /w/.  The other group is equally certain that /hw/
> is a single consonant, distinct from all other consonants, and
> not a cluster at all.
>
> Since I belong to the first group, and since the cluster analysis
> is historically correct, I was startled the first time I met
> a member of the second group, but I've met more of them since
> then, and there's no doubt that some people's intuitions are
> quite clear on this point: one consonant, a voiceless [w].
>
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
> Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>


From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au  Wed Feb  7 12:36:30 2001
From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:36:30 EST
Subject: New publication on Polynesian historical linguistics
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073630.EST.MALCOLM.ROSS@ANU.EDU.AU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
PACIFIC LINGUISTICS is happy to announce the publication of the
second (and final) volume of the Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics

Prices are in Australian dollars (one Australian dollar is currently
equivalent to about US$ 0,55.).

Orders may be placed by mail, e-mail or telephone with:

The Publications Administrator
Pacific Linguistics
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra   ACT   0200   Australia

Tel:    +61 (0)2 6249 2742
Fax:  +61 (0)2 6249 4896

mailto://jmanley at coombs.anu.edu.au


Credit card orders are accepted.

For our catalogue and other materials, see:

http://pacling.anu.edu.au (under construction)

_______________________________________________________________
SICOL Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Oceanic
Linguistics:  Vol. 2,  Historical and descriptive studies

Palmer, Bill and Paul Geraghty (eds)

PL 505

In July 1995 the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, played host
to the Second International Conference on Oceanic Languages, or SICOL - the
second in a successful series of international conferences devoted to the
main language family of the South Pacific, the Oceanic branch of the large
Austronesian stock.

A special session of the conference was devoted to contact languages, and a
number of papers from that session have already been published by Pacific
Linguistics as the first volume of the proceedings.  This second and final
volume contains a selection of papers dealing with Oceanic languages
themselves.  The nineteen papers presented here range from descriptive
studies of the morphology, syntax or lexicon of individual languages
through work on subgrouping to aspects of Proto Oceanic.

        Together these papers give a taste of the diversity of
Oceanic languages
and the range of research carried out on this important language
family. A list of contents is given below.

2000    ISBN 0 85883 476 6
AUS $93.00      ($85.00)
_______________________________________________________________

Part 1:  Proto Oceanic studies

1 Star, wind, and wave: searching for early Oceanic navigation terms
Meredith Osmond

2 Where did suli come from? A study of the words connected to taro
    plants in Oceanic languages
Ritsuko Kikusawa

3 The true prepositions/casemarkers in Proto Oceanic
Joseph C. Finney


Part 2:  Languages of Melanesia

4 Sit, stand, lie: posture verbs and imperfectives
Robert Early

5 'Come' and 'go' in Kilivila
Gunter Senft

6 Roviana clauses
Evelyn M. Todd

7 Linguistic subgrouping in Vanuatu and New Caledonia
John Lynch

8 How did Erromangan verbs get so messy?
Terry Crowley

9 'Adjectives' in Tamambo, Malo: syntactic variation, semantic and
    discourse correlation
Dorothy Jauncey

10 Some Raga vocabulary for terrestrial invertebrates, reptiles and
    mammals of North Pentecost
D.S. Walsh, Richard Leona, Wendy Pond

11 Postmodification and the structure of relatives in N?l?mwa and other
    Kanak languages of New Caledonia
Isabelle Bril

12 Un exemple de morphosyntaxe en Nengone (Nouvelle-Caledonie):
    les variations morphologiques et la transitivit?
R. Davel Cawa

Part 3:  Central Pacific languages

13 Two be's or not two be's? On the copulas of Wayan Fijian
Andrew Pawley

14 The dialects of the Yasawa Islands of Fiji
Geraldine Triffitt

15 Kuhane and 'aitu. Two cognate Polynesian terms which exclude
    each other
Horst Cain and Annette Bierbach

16 Cia-words in Tokelauan
Even Hovdhaugen

17 Ergative case avoidance in East Futunan (Efu)
Claire Moyse-Faurie

18 Gahua he tohi vagahau Niue: Niue dictionary project: orthography and
    vowel quality


From enl097 at abdn.ac.uk  Wed Feb  7 12:39:00 2001
From: enl097 at abdn.ac.uk (Robert McColl Millar)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 07:39:00 EST
Subject: Yags and other onomastic peculiarities
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.073900.EST.ENL097@ABDN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
There's a problem in seeing the Henry > Hal formation as being due to
non-Rhotic speakers. At the time when this phenomenon was still
productive (I'm thinking here of novels such as _Moll Flanders_ and
earlier), we assume that /r/ was still pronounced in these positions in
all dialects of English.
        I lived in London in the late eighties, at the time when Terry
Venables, the football manager, was coaching a Spanish side (Barcelona,
I think). The tabloids took great pleasure from referring to him as 'El
Tel'. I think I always assumed that this /l/ phenomenon was due to (a)
the fact that in South-East English dialects there is often no front
allophone of /l/, even before front vowels and (b) the subsequent
vocalisation of /l/, leading to confusion with /w/ (a similar
phenomenon to one found in many Scots dialects). I had thought that the
third part of this was that /r/ was no longer pronounced in similar
contexts, and was therefore capable of confusion. I based this on the
fact that so many people from the South-East have no /r/ at all,
apparently having /w/ instead -- a 'speech defect' elsewhere, but
perhaps a genuine sound change there due to lack of use of /r/.
        This idea is somewhat put on its head if the /r/ /l/ variation
predates the loss of /r/ medially and finally, however.

Robert Millar
University of Aberdeen

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:40:49 EST "Dr S. Watts" <sw271 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> --On Mon, Feb 5, 2001 9:59 am +0000 Richard Coates
> <richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > It seems to be in competition with a much rarer tendency to replace the
> > /r/ with /l/, as in:
> >
> > Terence > Tel (unless restricted to football managers - I've heard Tez
> > too) Derek > Del
>
> Rarer in contemporary English, but commoner historically:
> Henry - Harry - Hal
> Mary - Molly - Moll (and Polly - Poll)
> Dorothy - Dolly - Doll
> Sarah - Sally - Sal.
>
> Presumably the clip yielding a final -r is unsatisfactory for speakers of
> non-rhotic varieties of English. But why or when the change from
> predominantly -l to predominantly -z/-s, I don't know.
>
> Sheila Watts
> ___________________________________________________
> Dr Sheila Watts
> University Lecturer in German
> G06 Kennedy Building
> Newnham College
> Cambridge CB3 9DF
> Telephone +44-1223-335816

----------------------
Robert McColl Millar
enl097 at abdn.ac.uk


From Susan.Fitzmaurice at NAU.EDU  Wed Feb  7 19:02:39 2001
From: Susan.Fitzmaurice at NAU.EDU (Susan M. Fitzmaurice)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 14:02:39 EST
Subject: non-postvocalic /r/
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.140239.EST.SUSAN.FITZMAURICE@NAU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Colleagues,

Can you suggest some good recent historical studies of changes in
non-postvocalic /r/? I'm posting this for a morphologist colleague.  I'd be
jolly grateful for any pointers.

Susan Fitzmaurice
Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
English Department, Box 6032
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-6032
tel: (520) 523-9649
fax: (520) 523-7074


From faber at haskins.yale.edu  Wed Feb  7 19:04:46 2001
From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 14:04:46 EST
Subject: wh-clusters
In-Reply-To: <002901c090b4$5e94d8a0$57dc7dc2@jvzej>
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.140446.EST.FABER@HASKINS.YALE.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Clodagh Lynam wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Hallo Histlingers
>
>I am a Hiberno-English speaker, born and raised in Dublin.
>I have been teaching phonetics at tutorial level since 1987.
>In my experience, there are very few Hiberno-English speakers who
>do *not* distinguish between 'wh-' and 'w-'.  However, my son, who was
>also born and raised in Dublin and is now 16, made no distinction until he
>was about 8 or 9 years old - what to make of that??

I can find absolutely nothing on my bookshelf to back this up, but my
gut feeling is that 'wh' might simply be a late-acquired sound. The
only chart I can find of order of phonological acquisition, from a
British, source, goes up through age 4 1/2 or so; but there are other
sounds that some kids don't fully control until their second or third
year of primary school (r/w contrast, l, s/th, etc), and it wouldn't
surprise me to find 'wh' in that group.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203) 865-8963


From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Feb  8 01:34:25 2001
From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates)
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 20:34:25 EST
Subject: Celtic voices, English places
Message-ID: <WED.7.FEB.2001.203425.EST.RICHARDC@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>

Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze

Celtic voices, English places

Pub.: Shaun Tyas (1 High St., Donington, Spalding, Lincolnshire PE11
4TA, UK)

2000

Pp. xiv + 433

ISBN 1 900289 41 5

Price GBP 30

Contains 69 essays on English place-names, an introduction, gazetteer
and maps. The main theme is the survival of Brittonic names for places in
modestly larger numbers than hitherto believed; some Irish names in England
are also treated.

Richard Coates

--
Richard Coates
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains)
Fax:  +44 (0)1273 671320
Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Website: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/richardc/index.html


From bwarvik at abo.fi  Thu Feb  8 13:45:09 2001
From: bwarvik at abo.fi (Brita Warvik)
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 08:45:09 EST
Subject: historical discourse linguistics conference
Message-ID: <THU.8.FEB.2001.084509.EST.>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Apologies for duplicate postings

ORGANIZATION IN DISCOURSE II: The Historical Perspective

Announcing an international conference on historical discourse
linguistics and pragmatics to be held in Turku, Finland, August 7-11,
2002.  The invited speakers are Laurel Brinton, Andreas Jucker,
Fran?oise Salager-Meyer, and Irma Taavitsainen.

An advance notice for the conference has been posted at
http://www.utu.fi/hum/engfil/oid2002.html
The chairman of the Organizing Committee is Risto Hiltunen, Professor of

the English Department at the University of Turku.

The First Circular and a Call for Papers will be published in the summer

of 2001. Please contact us to be included in our mailing list.

E-mail:         oid2002 at utu.fi

On behalf of the Organizing Committee,

Brita Warvik
Department of English, Abo Akademi University
Turku, Finland


From cecil at cecilward.com  Tue Feb 13 12:53:24 2001
From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 07:53:24 EST
Subject: Yags: the story thus far
In-Reply-To: <E14Ndvd-00043K-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.13.FEB.2001.075324.EST.CECIL@CECILWARD.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask wrote

> Indeed, though such formations are far from dead.  My name is 'Larry',
and I am often addressed as 'Laz' or 'Lazza' by my British friends.
My British wife addresses her best friend, Marian, as 'Maz' or 'Mazza'.
The British politician Michael Heseltine is commonly referred to as
'Hezza' in the satirical magazine Private Eye -- though I doubt that
his friends call him this.

> I think this may be Australian, too, since I've encountered Australian
'Bazza' for 'Barry', at least in print.

There are a couple of interesting issues here. What strikes me about the "-a" ending which is a familiarity/informality marker is how quickly it became productive following the rise of its use by the English media in connection with "Gazza" for Paul Gascoigne, a footballer. "Hezza" suddenly appeared shortly afterwards. A year or two later, I was astonished to hear my wife, a singer, mention that she was due to perform "Mozza req." (Mozart's requiem!). I find it amazing that this process was so rapid.

Around the same time, my wife was referring to her friend Marion as "Mazza" too.

And so here we have a case of word "shape" becoming a carrier of semantic baggage, coming to carry a connotation of the speaker's familiarity with or affection for the referent. Makes you think about cases where, say, a new diminutive affix emerges.


From cecil at cecilward.com  Tue Feb 13 12:54:05 2001
From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 07:54:05 EST
Subject: 'wh' words
In-Reply-To: <1174991.3190008259@swatts.newn.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.13.FEB.2001.075405.EST.CECIL@CECILWARD.COM>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
An earlier contributor said:

>I can assure you that it is alive and kicking in Ireland and Scotland. It is the norm for us to the extent
that we find /w/-substitution incomprehensible when contextual information is inadequate.


And this accords with my experience of the various types of English I hear spoken here in the formerly Norse/Gaelic speaking Isle of Skye, Scotland. It seems to be true both for the English of Gaelic speakers and for that of English-monoglot highlanders.

Would anyone care to comment on the relationship between the modern regional distribution of /w/ vs /hw/ in Britain, and also Norwegian vs Swedish, say, and the old Germanic dialectal distributions?

Since another correspondant mentioned Gaelic, here's an aside: What happened to /hw-/ and /w-/ in these parts? Answer, they gave rise to /k-/ and /b/-words.

When English loans were taken into Gaelic in earlier centuries, the process of naturalisation had to deal with /hw/ and /w/, which, although both being present in Gaelic, may not occur in initial position in unmutated (radical, base) words. The solution was that all the English /hw/-words produced /k-/ and all the /w/-words /b-/. Hence
        "wall" ->       Gaelic "balla"
        "win" ->        Gaelic "buinnig"

        "wheel" ->      Gaelic "cuibhle" /k at jl@/        (where the @-sign is supposed to be a schwa)
        "whip" ->       Gaelic "cuip" /k at jhp/
        "The Whigs" ->  Gaelic "A' Chuigse" /@ xwIgs'@/

The two sounds of English therefore sounded very different to Gaelic ears.

The /h/ in /hw/, could occur in initial position, but only as a result of the grammatical initial mutation lenition, so it was analyzed as being the result of an assumed initial /k/ lenited to /x/ and realised as [h]. The /w/ in /hw/ was analyzed either as /u/ or taken as a labialised allophonic variant.

As for /w/-, neither could initial /w/ occur other as the result of a grammatical initial mutation, in this case from an assumed radical /b/ > grammatically lenited to produce /<beta>/ realised as <beta> / [w] / [v].

This is now part of history. In more recent times, increased exposure to English brought a new tolerance of English /w-/, giving a new process where /w-/ was loaned as /u-/ or /w-/. Example: "ueir" /we:r'/ (<"wire").


From w.croft at man.ac.uk  Fri Feb 23 18:02:04 2001
From: w.croft at man.ac.uk (Bill Croft)
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:02:04 EST
Subject: "Explaining Language Change"
Message-ID: <FRI.23.FEB.2001.130204.EST.W.CROFT@MAN.AC.UK>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I would like to announce that my book "Explaining Language
Change" is finally available outside the UK---it is now listed as
available at a major Internet bookseller, listed at US$22
paperback (the UK price is 19.99 pounds).

I am sending this announcement because the publisher (Longman)
was bought up by Pearson, who terminated linguistics
publication, is not marketing their recent linguistics books, and
has not answered correspondence.

I have appended the jacket description of the book. My apologies
to those who receive multiple copies of this announcement.

Bill Croft


"Explaining Language Change"
William Croft, University of Manchester
ISBN 0-582-35677-6 (paperback), June 2000. Pp. xvi, 287.

Ever since the origins of both linguistics and evolutionary
biology in the 19th century, scholars have noted the similarity
between biological evolution and language change. Yet until
recently neither linguists nor biologists have developed a model
of evolution general enough to apply across the two fields. Even
in linguistics, the field is split between the historical
linguists who study change in language structure, and the
sociolinguists who study social variation in the speech
community.

"Explaining language change" represents the first thoroughly
worked out framework for language evolution, building on the
pioneering ideas of Richard Dawkins and David Hull in biology
and philosophy of science. Its central thesis is that the locus
of language change is the utterance in social intercourse.
Linguistic innovations emerge from the remarkable complexity of
communication in social interaction. Once innovations occur,
they are propagated through the equally complex social
structures of the speech communities we participate in.

"Explaining language change" provides a framework for assessing
current theories of language change, and advances new ideas
about grammatical reanalysis, conventional and nonconventional
use of language, the structure of speech communities, language
mixing, and the notion of "progress" in language change.
"Explaining language change" reintegrates sociolinguistics and
historical linguistics, weaving together research on grammatical
change, pragmatics, social variation, language contact and
genetic linguistics.


From brp3 at psu.edu  Tue Feb 27 17:36:27 2001
From: brp3 at psu.edu (Richard Page)
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 12:36:27 EST
Subject: call, Germanic philology and linguistics
Message-ID: <TUE.27.FEB.2001.123627.EST.BRP3@PSU.EDU>

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION 2001 CONVENTION
Germanic Philology Discussion Group
New Orleans, Louisiana
27-30 December 2001

Deadline for Abstracts:  March 15, 2001

The Germanic Philology Discussion Group will be holding a meeting at the
2001 MLA Convention in New Orleans. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute
talks in all areas of Germanic linguistics and philology. Please send
1-page abstracts and queries to:

Richard Page
Penn State University
311 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
email: brp3 at psu.edu