CV canonical form ??

ECOLING at aol.com ECOLING at aol.com
Wed Sep 8 13:52:35 UTC 1999


>[ start LT quote]
>Well, I am unwilling to assume in advance that CV syllable structures
>must have been typical of Pre-Basque.  In fact, my preliminary work
>suggests strongly that Pre-Basque had an enormous proportion of
>vowel-initial words, probably totaling at least 50% of the recoverable
>lexicon, and possibly more.  This I consider unusual, though a query
>last year on the LINGUIST List turned up a few other languages with the
>same property.

This portion of what Jon quoted from Larry Trask appears
because of its context to be referring to something I wrote,
but in fact it was not relevant to my position.

I did not propose and I do not propose
that we should assume in advance that CV syllable structures
are typical of Basque.
My point was rather just the opposite, that use of the canonical-form
method might tend to exaggerate the importance of CV-structures
precisely because they are typologically (world-wide) so common.

I was very happy to hear Larry Trask say that early Basque probably
had an unusually high proportion of vowel-initial words.
THAT I consider an important observation or finding,
precisely because of its deviation from statistically most common
canonical forms.

My argument was solely against the use of typical canonical
forms to rule out vocabulary as supposedly part of the native stratum
of a reconstructed language.
This way of proceeding often distorts.
It has a tendency to exaggerate the degree of consistency
within a language, because many languages have a mixture of
canonical forms (therefore do not have a single overriding exclusive
canonical form).

Especially when applied to sound-symbolic vocabulary,
it is dangerous to use canonical forms developed from
other vocabulary,
because these two may often differ in typical phonological
shapes (canonical forms).

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics



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