"syllabicity"

[Patrick C. Ryan]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Rich and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Alderson <ALDERSON at netcom.com>
Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 8:53 PM

> On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>>From: <CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
>>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM

First, let me tell you that I appreciate your taking the time to write a
magisterial summary of the questions involved.

Leo writes:

>>> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to
>>> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis
>>> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE
>>> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd
>>> developments in the Germanic languages.  Not surprisingly, the book is a
>>> mess.

Rich writes:

> Lehmann is no more a god than is Szemere'nyi, Brugmann, Beekes, Watkins, or
> Cowgill.  He falls down on certain issues, as do all the others, and gets
> some things right, as do all the others.  But much of what he wrote 50 years
> ago-- and that is about how long ago it was written--is a mess.

I am sorry but I cannot agree with the terminology "mess". What Lehmann
wrote may or may not have been superseded by better formulations but what he
wrote then was thought-provoking and ground-breaking, and quite of important
at the time.

> However, Leo Connolly's use of "Neo-Grammarian" to describe his work is no
> more dismissive

Pat writes:
It was specifically the word "mess" to which I object in both Leo's and your
characterization. And I agree: we have no gods on earth but some men
outperform  their fellows so brilliantly that they deserve a little
consideration and *tact*.

Rich writes:

> than to so label the work of Carl Brugmann.  It assumes the system
> reconstructed in Brugmann & Delbrueck, and attempts to explain exceptions in
> a way which the _Grundriss_, Hirt, or Meillet would have approved (whether
> or not they would have agreed with them).  Unfortunately, the
> _Junggrammatiker_ system needed to be re-examined, and by not doing so
> Lehmann causes himself problems.

Leo writes:

>>> The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate
>>> with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify
>>> *exactly*;

Pat writes:

>>This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly
>>specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a
>>predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last
>>word,  could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial
>>[Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC];  [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC];
>>[CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that?

Rich writes:

> It's extremely simple.  However, what evidence do you have to back it up?
> It certainly does not appear in _Grundriss_ or Meillet.

Pat writes:
Do you dispute it?

Leo writes:

>>> since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this
>>> within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y
>>> w/, not "true" vowels,

Pat writes:

>>I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in
>>a book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's
>>dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists
>>still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any
>>Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic
>>[i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you
>>might have a talking point but they do not.

Rich writes:

> Read very carefully what Leo Connolly wrote:  Not that *y *w were not
> consonantal, but that in the structuralist framework (alive and well in the
> 1940s) made Lehmann choose one way or the other, and he chose to see *y *w
> as primary, and *i *u as secondary.  That's a problem with structuralism,
> not with whether *y and *w were or were not consonantal.

Pat writes:

In whatever framework one wishes to operate, the idea that consonantal <y/w>
are primary is the only idea that makes sense. Would you call Beekes a
Junggrammatiker?

Rich writes:

> In structuralist terms, two phones in complementary distribution *must* be,
> cannot *not* be, allophones of a single phoneme.  (Although a lemma
> requiring something called "phonetic similarity" was inserted into the
> theory when it was pointed out that in a pure framework, the English phones
> [h] and [N], as in _hang_ [h&N], must be allophones of a single phoneme...)
> Therefore, in the prevailing structuralist framework of the 1940s, Lehmann
> *had* to define *i and *u as allophones respectively of *y and *w.

Pat writes:

Lehmann was under no obligation to be consistently structuralist, and your
assumption that he was is pure conjecture. By "syllabicity", Lehmann
indicated that he was quite willing to strike out on uncharted paths. If the
evidence had indicated anything different, I am positive Lehmann would have
embraced the position it made mandatory.

Leo writes:

>>> just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/.

Pat writes:

>>The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become
>>syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent.

Rich writes:

> So the fact that all *six* resonants pattern the same is irrelevant?

Pat writes:

In my opinion, it is a mistake to include [Y/W] among the resonants.
Phonologically, [j] is the voiced palato-dorsal fricative; [w] is the voiced
bilabial fricative. *And they do not pattern the same*.

Rich writes:

> That *ey/oy/i parallels *en/on/.n by accident?  Then you disagree with
> Lehmann?  What of his god-like status?  Never mind, rhetorical questions.

Pat writes:

I do not consider Lehmann god-like although I do believe that most people on
their best days will not equal what has has written on his worst. I also do
not shrink from disagreeing with his written opinions but, in view of his
sagacity, I do so with great caution.

And I reject the idea totally that *ey/oy/i and *ew/ow/u parallel *en/on/n{.}.

Rich writes:

> In a structuralist framework, if two processes appear to be the same, they
> must *be* the same, and you cannot separate *y *w from *n *m *r *l in this
> way.

Leo writes:

>>> Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE
>>> (his view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often
>>> have vowels where there were once laryngeals.  The Neogrammarians had
>>> posited PIE Schwa in just such places.

Pat writes:

>>I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by
>>Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite.

Rich writes:

> Your belief has nothing to do with the evidence.  As pointed out elsewhere
> by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, there is evidence for *consonantal* reflexes of
> one or more laryngeals in non-Anatolian languages; Germanicists have long
> argued for the presence of consonantal laryngeals in Germanic (and Lehmann
> is included in this group).  All Indo-Europeanists who accept laryngeals
> (and this is very nearly all of them by now) accept that they were
> consonantal in PIE.

Pat writes:

We have been investigating the "evidence" on which you ( and others) bas
their belief, and so far, I have not seen a compelling argument. Would you
like to take over for Peter?

<snip>

Pat writes:

>>Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe
>>Lehmann's "syllabism" violates?

> This is the reason it has taken me a week to get around to responding to
> this posting, and not wearing my moderator hat to do so.  It's a very large
> question with an answer unlikely to satisfy the questioner.

> First, you must understand that I follow David Stampe's "Natural Phonology",
> as outlined in his dissertation and other works, and in the works of his
> students.  Most important in this context is the work by Patricia (Donegan)
> Stampe on the phonology of vowel systems.  Natural Phonology is process-
> oriented and requires that both lexical representations and derivations
> always be pronounceable;

Pat writes:

I subscribe to this idea without reservation.

Rich continues:

> it is thus distinguished from Chomsky & Halle's _Sound Pattern of English_-
> style generative phonology, in which underlying (lexical) representations of
> English reproduce the Great English Vowel Shift.  (See, for example, her
> dissertation, _The Natural Phonology of Vowels_, available as an Ohio State
> Working Paper in Linguistics, No. 27 I think.)

> On this basis, as an undergraduate I began an examination of the monovocalic
> analysis of Indo-European 25 years ago.  I started out with what I
> considered the most interesting analysis of IE vowels, that of W. P.
> Lehmann, and looked for parallels in other languages (as the only way to
> demonstrate that an analysis is valid is for it to explain not only
> historical but synchronic phenomena in more than one language).

Pat writes:

You surely would include diachronic phenomena, would you not?

Rich continues:

> This led me to look at Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, and Kabardian, all of which
> have very large obstruent systems and very small vowel systems.

> Natural Phonology is, as well as process-oriented, constraint-oriented and
> hierarchical:  The presence of certain phonological entities entails the
> presence of others.  Thus, vowel systems are constrained:  Certain kinds of
> vowel system are more stable than others, and unstable vowel systems rapidly
> turn into stable systems by either eliminating contrast or by adding
> contrast.  In addition, processes which are not repressed may increase
> distinctions between vowels in the system (long vowels may become tense, for
> example, or a distinction in palatality vs. labiality may arise as in Arabic
> short /a/ vs. long /a:/ = [&] vs. [O:]).

Pat writes:

Although this is not really an argument against the point you are making,
Arabic long /a:/ does not become [o:]; this is reserved for reductions of
/aw/.

Rich continues:

> There is no such thing, in the world's languages, as a system with only one
> phonemic vowel (and _a fortiori_ no such thing as a language with none).
> The smallest phonemic vowel inventories yet found are in the languages I
> named above--and the analyses which shrink them to two vowels may violate
> one or more of the axioms of natural phonology.

Pat writes:

A very interesting qualification.

Rich continues:

> Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of
> Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel:  If a phone is present in a language,
> it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate
> with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or
> unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status.

Pat writes:

IMHO, this is incorrect. If we accept Trask's definition of a phoneme as
"the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning" and restrict
"meaning" to "semantic difference" vs. grammatical difference, then a
language in which CaC, CeC, CiC, CoC, CuC, etc. represent different
grammatical stems of a root CVC, which has *one*, meaning, then the
"syllabicity" in the root makes no difference, and hence cannot be
considered "phonemic".

But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with
the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was
monovocalic (at least, phonemically).

Anything other than <Ca> in Sanskrit is a result of <Ca> + <H>, <w>, or <y>,
or a combination thereof. That is why Sanskrit does not bother to indicate
an <Ca> in its writing system (only <C>). Only combinations of <Ca> + <?>
*need* to be indicated.

Pat

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