Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE?

[Roslyn M. Frank]

    Date:       Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 (BST)
    From:       Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>

    On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

    > Larry, what is the phenomenon of Aquitanian that makes <andre>
    > unpronounceable. thanks

[LT]
    The /dr/ cluster.  Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters,
    and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were
    invariably eliminated in one way or another.  See sections 18.4-18.5 of
    Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including
    such familiar ones as these:

    Lat <libru> --> Bq <liburu> `book'
    Lat <gloria> --> Bq <loria> `glory'

[snip]

It seems to me that perhaps we are perhaps talking at cross purposes here.
Let me cite an example. In Euskera we find a root stem such as <buru> whose
phonological structure is native. However, in actual speech practice we
find that accent in Euskera is not precisely "word specific". I don't know
the proper linguistic term for this phenomenon. Rather where the accent
will fall depends on to a great degree on the suffixing elements added to
the root stem as well as the overall placement of that lexical chain in the
utterance. Furthermore, somewhat as what occurs in English, unstressed
vowels often become schwa and/or essentially disappear in actual speech.
Often there is a "ghost" or "shadow" left over from the template of the
intervening vowel, just enough for the interlocutor to "disambiguate" the
morphological elements in the utterance. Sorry, but I don't know what you
all call these kinds of highly reduced sounds.

For example, <buruko> "of the head" (sometimes with a referential field
comprising "scarf; pillow") is, depending on its placement, sometimes heard
as <bur(u)ko> and at others as <b(u)ruko>. The speaker is fully aware that
the form is <buruko> but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the
case of <andere> it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result
being <and(e)re> or <and(e)r(e)a> when the definite article is attached.

In other words, I would agree with Larry that the <dr> cluster did not
exist, in principle, but I am less certain whether it wasn't present in
actual speech practice, for example, in Aquitainian/Euskera.

Certainly other languages have similar phenomena: one phonological set of
features characterizes the language at one level but a significantly
different one is found operating at another, e.g., when one sits down to
listen to actual speech samples, especially from non-literate informants.

Furthermore, I would argue that one of the most difficult things for a
non-native speaker to acquire is an intuitive knowledge of these subtleties
in the second language. this is especially true when the second language is
studied and consequently learnt in an instructional/school setting. Indeed,
we are talking of extremely complex rules that govern such changes. These
are far too complex for the foreign language teacher to teach explicitly or
for a student to acquire "rationally". Yet the changes are "known"
intuitively by a native-speaker. The latter will pick up immediately on the
fact that the person is a non-native speaker when that person attempts to
"mis-pronounce" a word, e.g., change speech registers, for example. Comments?

Best regards,
Roz Frank
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu