No subject

[jonpat at staff.cs.su.oz.au]

Ros Frank has asked me to send this item to the list on her behalf as she does
not have subscriber access from her current account.
I will offer my own account when I can get through the backlog in my mail.
jon patrick

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I am writing to make a couple of brief comments on the monosyllabic project
that Jon Patrick has mentioned on the list. I've beenout of the country for
a while so I haven't been able to follow all the discussion of late.
Hopefully I won't be repeating to many things that have already been said.

First, I would like to point out an aspect of the project that I find
particularly interesting, although I don't think it has been mentioned on
the list. As I understand the monosyllabic project, at least as it was
conceptualized a year or so ago, it can be characterized as having two
stages. The first stage is that of coming up with an agreed upon description
of the phonological constraints of pre-Basque, i.e., its phonology prior to
contact with the Romance languages. That stage requires developing a uniform
description. However, as I understand the present situation in Basque there
is not total agreement concerning this stage of the reconstruction of
Euskera. Stated differently there are disagreements among Basque linguists.
That fact would seem to call for more than one set of "rules" to be
developed and applied to the data. Or at least in the case of the elements
in question, there would need to be two different renditions of the data
provided, one that modelled it according to one paradigm and another
simulation that would result from the alternate set of premises concerning
this pre-Basque phonology.

Secondly, as I understand it, once these rules are developed (whether they
result in two or more simulations is not the issue), they can be applied to
generate the total picture of what monosyllabic root-stems the phonological
system in question would have supported/permitted.

Some time back I saw an early version of this data in which Jon had
indicated which slots were filled and which were empty.  In the case of the
empty slots, it would seem to me that they might provide the basis for some
interesting discussion concerning why they are not filled. At the same time,
as Jon knows, in my opinion some of the (apparently) monosyllabic root-stems
may, indeed, be composed of a root and a suffixing element.  These patterns,
of course, can be readily detected by examining the data, e.g., the
percentage of root-stems that show the same final elements. For those
familiar with the suffixing processes in Euskera, I'm particularly
interested in the way that the <-tz> suffixing element may be coming into
play in the case of certain examples.

Comments?

Roz Frank
e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa

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