Basque 'sei'

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) wrote:

>Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
>/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
>is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
>Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
>things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
>stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
>non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
>It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
>fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

>We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
>distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
>way back into the past.

One problem with apical vs. laminal /s/ is the lack of data.
Because of the fact that the two *are* distinguished
phonologically in Basque [I'm not aware of any other language
where this is the case], and this fact linked with the
observation that the default /s/ in Castillian is apical, has led
to a decent amount of data being available for the areas
surrounding Basque and Castilian.  We know that apical /s/ is
also the norm in Galician and northern Portugal, in Catalan, in
Gascon and in Languedocien Occitan.  On the other hand, laminal
/s/ dominates in southern Portugal and Spain, and in the rest of
the langue d'oc and langue d'oeil areas.  I would expect a
transition to laminal /s/ also in Valencian Catalan, but I don't
know.  As to the rest of Europe, or the world, data are almost
entirely lacking.  I believe Old/Middle High German <z,z,> is
believed to have been an apical sibilant, opposed to laminal
<ss>, and I've read somewhere that apical pronunciations of /s/
are not unknown in individual varieties of English.  But I don't
think I've ever seen a mention of the apical/laminal opposition
for /s/ in the description of the phonological systems of most
languages.  I mean, Abkhaz and Zulu have the phoneme /s/, but is
it apical or laminal?  Or doesn't it matter?
As to myself, were it not for the fact that I've studied a bit
phonetics, I would have spoken Dutch with apical /s/ my whole
life without even knowing it (now I do so knowing it: too late to
change now).  Nobody ever told me, or probably even noticed...
In that sense, it's not unlikely that the current distribution of
apical and laminal /s/ *can* be projected "way back into the
past".  Unlike other phoneme substitutions, this is one that
might have gone completely unnoticed, in say the Roman era,
without any purist pressure whatsoever to replace it with "real",
laminal, Latin /s/.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl