From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 02:22:12 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 18:22:12 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: >There is one minimal pair that works for most of my British students: > 'assure' / 'azure' >But this doesn't work at all in my American accent, since I stress >'azure' on the first syllable -- a pronunciation that invokes giggles >or scowls from my students. Also, in my variant of American, I actually use a different vowel in the last syllable. (Syllabic-r in the first, a short 'oo' sound in the second). >Clearly, the choice of [esh] or [ezh] cannot be governed by rule. >In fact, there is probably no more economical way to account for >the distribution of these two sounds than to give lists of the >words containing them. This observation is enough to establish >thet they must be distinct phonemes -- even if we have no minimal >pairs. And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). >> [PR] >> Could you name a "best text on phonology", and cite a relevant definition of >> phoneme from it? >I suggest the following: >Francis Katamba (1989), An Introduction to Phonology, London: Longman. >pp. 22-23. Thanks. My library is in such disarray I just couldn't find the right books. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 03:06:08 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:06:08 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <015101bf99d0$3513ca80$749f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:42 PM 3/29/00 +0000, proto-language wrote: >Dear Larry and IEists: >[PR] >Now I am really confused. I would have thought that /h/ could be established >by many minimal pairs like [her] / [per] and /ng/ by many minimal pairs like >[bang] / [ban], along the lines of your dictionary's: "The existence of such >a pair demonstrates conclusively that the two segments which are different >must belong to two different phonemes." But none of those minimal pairs requires that /h/ and /ng/ belong to different phonemes. After all, there are allophones for which the rule really is based on initial versus final position. For instance, in High German, the allophone of /d/ at the end of a word is voiceless. Minimal pairs only establish the *particular* sounds involved as distinct. They do not resolve the issue with regards to other sound pairs. [PR] >So what other condition is "*sufficient*" to establish a phonemicity? I think you mean 'necessary', since a minimal pair *is* sufficient (by itself it establishes the two sounds which distinguish the two words as distinct phonemes). It is, however not *necessary*, since /h/ and /ng/ are treated as distinct phonemes even in the absence of a minimal pair demonstrating their distinction. I am not sure there *is* any single necessary condition. [PR] >Ah, a diplomatic answer. >Well, a rule that has been proposed to account for IE /o/ is that it results >when the (tonal-/stress) accent of an /e/ is shifted to another syllable. Now, the problems with this are various. First, the rules for allophones must refer to *synchronic* features. A shifted accent is no longer present as a conditioning feature. (However, a rule referring to the position of a syllable *relative* to an accent is allowable, as in the rule on Proto-Germanic reflexes of PIE obstruents). So, by its very form, postulating the *removal* of a conditioning factor, this model requires the *reconstructed* PIE *o to be a phoneme. Second, in many cases the "accent shift" is postulated *solely* on the grounds of the existence of /o/. This is circular reasoning. Internal reconstruction can only take you so far! Finally, there are a number of cases of reconstructed PIE /o/ for which an accent shift is dubious, at the very least. (Many of these are "grammatical" /o/s, which are only possible if it is already a phoneme). >Additionally of interest is that no IE verbal root seems to contain /o/. That goes to show it was a relatively recent acquisition as a phoneme, not that it was not one. I do agree, PIE *o must be recently generated, probably from more than one source. >So, applying your insight, is IE /o/ a phoneme or not? In PIE proper, yes, it is. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 03:17:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in >English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless >claim that there has been a phomemic split similar to what occurred with >/s/ and /z/). This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words >and pronouns, [th] otherwise. Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. One approach one can take in living languages is to check the speaker's awareness of the distinction. Often an untrained speaker is unaware of true allophonic distinctions. For instance, the aspiration/non-aspiration of voiceless stops in English is not generally even noticed by most speakers. It usually has to be demonstrated to them before they can recognize it. On the other hand, most English speakers I know of seem to be quite aware of the /th/ vs. /dh/ distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 2 14:21:13 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 17:21:13 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Mar, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: >Since, for example, some of the innovations that define >Proto-Germanic seem to be quite recent -- Iron Age, judging by >the development of the Celtic loanwords for things like iron >technology and some social terminology like "king" or "servant" >-- what would be the distinction between pre-proto-Germanic and >pre-Balto-Slavic in, say, 1500 or 2000 BCE? >Not a question that can be settled, of course, but interesting to >contemplate. (My own guess would be "not much".) Solving the distinctions between Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic seems to be one of the major problems of IE classification. As I remember the discussions of the UPenn tree, this is where it had the most problems determining the branching. Not to mention the question of whether there actually was a Balto-Slavic unity or not. The reason for this, I think, lies in the fact that there has been extensive reconvergence among the early forms of these stocks so that the original branchings have been obscured. There is fairly conclusive evidence that at one point there was a circum-Baltic sprachbund that included Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Balto-Finnic. Reconvergence under the effects of the sprachbund is a great little blurrer of earlier distinctions. >>but after this change this branch seems to have become very >>conservative (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic). >-- here I would disagree, to a certain extent. Baltic and >Slavic yes; but Indo-Iranian, no. After all, Sanskrit appears >conservative precisely because the version we have was fossilized >as a "learned" and liturgical language, rather like Latin. Its >forms date from a very early period, analagous to that of our >Mycenaean and Hittite records. Yes, I grant you this. In fact (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic) almost looks like a "which language doesn't belong here?" question. Sanskrit looks archaic because, well, it's archaic -- as you say, it is at least 3000 years closer to PIE than modern Lithuanian is. >>(actually, one of the other Baltic languages, like Old Prussian >>or Curonian, may have been even more conservative, but since >>little or nothing of them survive it is not possible to say). >-- very true; entropy strikes again. On the other hand, if you >run Latvian backward, you get a proto-language very much like >Lithuanian! Plus, of course, we know that much of the >territory now occupied by Latvian was originally Uralic. Yes, and it would seem that Baltic (or one of its previous manifestations) has pretty much always been in contact with Uralic. First we have the evidence of contact between PIE and PU, then there are the Old Iranian loans at the PFU level, but there are also Slavic loans in all the FU languages (but not, apparently, inherited from the proto-language, and who can really tell the difference between Slavic and Baltic at this stage). Then there are the sprachbund effects leading right down to the present day when Baltic and Balto-Finnic are still in contact. >>But again (or still) this doesn't say anything specific about >>where they started out geographically except that Baltic was >>always in close proximity to Slavic. >-- not definitively, no. >However, at the earliest historic attestation, Baltic was >directly north of Slavic and Slavic extended from east of the >Vistula into the forest-steppe of the Ukraine. The relationship >of Baltic and Slavic and the lack of identifiable substrata other >than some influence from Uralic _and_ the presence of Baltic >river-names in the eastern and northeastern areas later colonized >by Slavic (Russian and Beorussian particularly) would argue that >they had occupied both this relative position _and_ their >respective actual territories for a very, very long time. I grant you all this, but note that this argument does not make use of linguistic conservatism, which, I think, is as it should be. It is quite possible that Baltic is very conservative in some features and that it may very well have been near the IE homeland, but I don't think that this is a cause and effect relationship. I would be willing to give more weight to the persistent connection with Uralic as an indication of not having moved much than to linguistic conservatism. >>But the presence of more archaic lexical items and fewer obvious >>substrate borrowings could equally well be a result of the >>refusal of the language to accept loans as of its still being in >>its original home. >-- quite true; we know, for example, that Anglo-Saxon ended up in >England due to migration and supplanted a Brythonic-Celtic >language (and Latin), but you couldn't prove it by linguistics >alone. 11th-century Anglo-Saxon, the Wessex dialect >specifically, was still an extremely ordinary West Germanic >language and probably fully mutually comprehensible with its near >kin in the Low Countries. It was still marginally mutually >comprehensible with Scandinavian, for that matter. And there >were very few Celtic loan-words -- about 12, if I remember >correctly. But this is more or less typical of substratum influence on superstratum languages. Using Amerind influence on English as an example, words taken into the superstratum will typically be toponyms (Mississippi, Mississinewa, Missouri) or words for local flora (squash) and fauna (woodchuck, chipmunk) or local implements (moccasin, tomahawk, wampum, wigwam) or institutions (powwow) that the superstratum language lacks. Other words will tend to be used pejoratively or for comic effect (papoose, squaw, mugwump). If the superstratum language came from a similar area (as in the case of Anglo-Saxon) so that the flora and fauna are familiar, there is not likely to be new words coming into the language in this area, and if the superstratum language preferred to rename the topological features in its own language or calque or folk etymologize these names from the old language, there would not be many here either (but note the persistence of Latin-based place names in England into modern English). And so on through the list. >So the archaism and lack of non-IE loanwords in the Baltic >languages _by itself_ would not be a firm indication of >anything, as you say. However, when taken in _combination_ with >other factors, we're in somewhat different territory. Agreed that the more evidence that points in the same direction, the more likely that direction is to be the correct one. But likely still doesn't mean definitely so it is still a purely hypothetical solution. But it is still useful to be able to disprove a theory piecemeal, because these potential disproofs provide falsifiability for the parts of the theory. And if the parts of the theory can't be falsified when there is a test for falsification available, then the entire theory gains in strength. In essence, it makes the theory scientific even if the theory as a whole has no test for falsification. So there is nothing wrong with saying that while the individual pieces of a theory could all be explained differently, doing so stretches the limits of both coincidence and credulity and therefore the simpler explanation provided by the theory is more likely to be correct. This is enumerative induction as opposed to eliminative induction. A while back we had a lengthy discussion on the validity of the laryngeal theory. The opponent of the theory claimed that all the effects of the laryngeal theory could be accounted for by 16 or 17 different rules operating in various places. When it was pointed out to him that the statistical probability of this happening was virtually nil, he eventually accepted the laryngeal theory as correct in its essentials. (Of course, we're still arguing about the number of laryngeals and their values, but that is a different matter.) >Eg., Anglo-Saxon/Old English is geographically peripheral to the >main mass of the Germanic languages, with salt water in between, >and there -are- a number of Celtic place-names in its territory, >increasing in number as you move west. Even if one knew nothing >about the history prior to 1000 CE, you'd still have enough for >an informed guess that Anglo-Saxon was a fairly recent offshoot >of the main Germanic zone. (And, taking in similar evidence from >the Continent, that Germanic in general had been expanding at the >expense of Celtic and Romance.) And at the expense of Slavic too, but that also is a different matter. >>English, on the other hand, just gobbles up loanwords and >>neologisms regardless of whether they violate English >>phonotactics or not (e.g., aardvark, gnu, syzygy). This is >>simply not a function of how close these respective languages >>are to their original homelands. >-- true; although, of course, we know that German is much closer >geographically to the proto-Germanic _urheimat_. But not *in* the Germanic Urheimat. There is still not a cause and effect relationship. If the Goths came from Gotland, then Swedish is closest to the Germanic Urheimat. And modern Swedish has about as many loanwords as modern English does. But because most of these loans come from Low German they are not as noticeable as the predominantly Latin/French loans in English so the point is not often raised. >Interestingly enough, English only became exceptionally open to >loan-words after the Norman Conquest. Prior to that, Old English >was notably resistant to foreign lexical influence. No, it is only after the Norman Conquest that the loans become easily noticeable. There are a lot of loans from Scandinavian in English that predate the Norman Conquest that most native speakers don't even recognize as loans. This is the effect of adstratum borrowing from a closely cognate language (in the case of Scandinavian and Old English, practically a matter of dialect borrowing) and is very similar to the effects of Swedish borrowings from Low German. In adstratum borrowing, very common, everyday words can be borrowed for quite a number of reasons. Among the most common of these is greater differentiation or specialization in meaning. There are thus quite a number of Scandinavian borrowings in which both the inherited word and the borrowed word still exist but are specialized in different uses. For example: Native English Scandinavian shirt skirt shuttle skittle shoe sky (both originally meant 'covering') 'em them yard garden rear raise whole hale Unless one has been specifically taught that the Scandinavian forms are borrowings, one is not likely to recognize them as such (with the exception of those that begin with sk- since it is fairly obvious that any word that begins thus in English is a loan [or a dialectal form]), in contrast to French borrowings like 'facade' 'chalet' or 'chandelier' which jump out as loanwords from their spelling and pronunciation. >>If we didn't have a historical record of the situation, the >>argument of conservatism plus lack of substratum influence could, >>other things being equal, be used to claim that Iceland is the >>original Scandinavian homeland. >-- good point. >Although there, we know that there was no prior population -- and >my original argument was that Baltic probably entered an area not >far away from the _urheimat_ ... _and_ one which was very thinly >populated. (What's now the eastern part of the Baltic was late >being neolithicized, if memory serves me correctly.) Yes, knowing what happened makes it easier to do reconstructions. But the fact that we know that Icelandic had no substratum influence and we suspect that Baltic didn't have much, doesn't say anything about how far away from their original homelands they are. If it did, your hypothesis would be in real trouble, because if Icelandic has no substratum influence and is conservative and is a long way from its homeland, then if Baltic also has no substratum influence and is conservative, then it should also be a long way from its homeland. These are just not one cause - one effect relationships. If one effect can have many causes, then lack of the effect does not say which cause is responsible. Lack of substratum influence can be the result of a lack of a substratum or of a refusal to be influenced. As an example consider the following: There is no evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate coverup. This implies: a) Nixon was not involved in the Watergate coverup; b) all evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate coverup has been suppressed or destroyed. Which is true? >>Negative evidence cannot be used to construct specific >>scenarios. Negative evidence only means that there is no >>evidence. >-- it's not demonstrative, as positive evidence is. However, I >think it can be legitimately used _in conjunction_ with other >supporting evidence to say that one of a number of alternative >explanations is more likely than another. Yes, negative evidence is not completely worthless, but it can only lead to negative conclusions which may allow you to eliminate some of the potential causes. It is particularly useful if there is a reciprocal one effect - one cause relationship. If there is no smoke without fire AND no fire without smoke, then no smoke means no fire. But it still doesn't tell you why there is no fire. But if it is possible to have a fire without smoke, then no smoke just means no smoke. In this case, smoke means fire, but no smoke doesn't necessarily mean no fire. >As Holmes said, the crucial thing was what the dog did in the >night. When Watson pointed out that the dog had done nothing in >the night, he replied: "Exactly." Well, close enough. But the point of this is not so much that the dog didn't bark, but what it would have taken to make the dog bark. If the dog never barked at anything, then the fact that the dog did not bark in the night would not have been interesting at all. Since the dog didn't bark, either there was no dog or nothing happened to make the dog bark. Now if the dog barks at strangers or at rabbits but not at people that it knows, then if some unaccountable act is performed in the night and the dog doesn't bark (and we know that there was a dog) that eliminates strangers (and rabbits) as having performed the act. But it still doesn't tell which non-stranger/non-rabbit did perform the act. This is why negative hypotheses are generally scientific (falsifiable) while the opposing positive ones are not. "There is no Santa Claus" is a scientific theory because it can be falsified by producing the one and only true Santa Claus. "There is a Santa Claus" is not a scientific theory because it cannot be falsified. It can only be disputed with negative evidence. Of course, scientific doesn't mean necessarily true, it just refers to the way in which it can be investigated. So there is nothing wrong with believing in Santa Claus. It just means that no one can prove that you are wrong if you do. And if you are sure that all the evidence has been destroyed, this can be a very comfortable position to be in. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sat Apr 1 17:42:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 17:42:00 GMT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Message-ID: It's indeed crucial: What really are 'certain shared innovations'? They are never 'certain'. Even with perfect sound correspondences these may be just chance. They of cource then would have a high probability of not being just chance. >the UPenn tree being discussed was entirely built on (in form at least) >a narrowed sample of 'data' .. I again must insist: We do not have the data for the UPenn tree; and therefore we cannot discuss anything! Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 1 14:59:48 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 16:59:48 +0200 Subject: Tonal and stress accents In-Reply-To: <005c01bf970e$4afe9d80$ba4601d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, petegray wrote: > Jens said: >> There was stress before PIE, and stress >> after PIE, why not _in_ PIE? To this Peter replied: > I find this argument more persuasive than your earlier ones, Jens, but we > are still left with the evidence of Greek, which does not appear to have had > a stress accent until well after the classical period. Sanskrit accent is > also described as pitch, but I know the details less well, and cannot argue > that stress is precluded by the evidence, the way I would wish to for Greek. > I know that the Sanskrit grammarians use only pitch terms, not stress, and > that there is no sign of the stress effects on adjacent syllables that we > would expect to find with a stress accent. > If these two languages did indeed have no stress accent, then your logic > seems shakier - it is not necessarily true that the PIE stress accent > continued unabated from the earliest time. Thank you, I see your point very well, Peter, but I still find it hard to believe that stress (of the time when zero-grades were born) changed into high pitch (as assumed for PIE), and that high pitch later changed back into stress everywhere it got a chance. Could the reason why we don't see syllable weakenings caused by the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (etc.) not simply be that these effects had already happened, so that we are looking at the results? Latin has a lot of weakenings caused by the ealier initial stress, but none yet caused by the historical accent on the penult or antepenult; still, all Romance languages testify to this accent and enough have strong reductions caused by it to prove that it existed already in their common prestage. I don't know of any weakenings caused by the fixed stress of Polish or Czech, nor Finnish for that matter. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if there _were_ degrees of duration or aperture ("sonority") that would show in fine measurings. Do stress accents have to be accompanied by _instant_ alternations of phonemic proportions? Can't changes begin subphonemically and go ignored for long periods? - I agree that we cannot dismiss high pitch for the PIE accent syllable, but only then accompanied with some prominence of the kind we call stress, for that can be reconstructed too. Actually, there are a few accentrelated phonological changes in Greek. Most notably, the sequence CRHC comes out different dependent on the position of the accent. Born without proper vowels, the sequence is normally unaccented, and so gives Gk. CRe:C/CRa:C/CRo:C (with H1, H2, H3 respectively), but if the accent is shifted onto the syllabified sonant to mark a change of part of speech, the result is CaRaC in the case of H2 (less well known for the other laryngeals), cf. pairs like vb.adj. kma:to's (Att. kme:to's) 'worn out' : subst. ka'matos 'fatigue'; thna:to's (Att. -e:-) 'dead' : sbst. tha'natos 'death'; quite possibly also vb.adj. gne:to's 'born' : sbst. ge'nesis from *g^nH1-to-/-ti- with different placing of the accent. Does this difference point to pitch or stress? I'd vote for stress any day, for the following reason: Phonetically, a syllabified sonant differs only from an asyllabic sonant in one respect, viz. with regard to duration. In English, the final syllable of rotten is articulated just like the n of not, only a bit longer, this giving the impression on experienced listeners of an additional syllable. Thus, the phonetic protoform of kma:to's must have been something like *k^m:xto's, which in Greek assimilated the final part of the segment [m:] to the articulation of the "laryngeal" (i.e., velar or uvular) low spirant that followed, this giving something in the order of [kmaxto's] whence, by the usual loss of laryngeals with compensatory lengthening, the output form kma:to's as we find it to be. Now, if the accent is shifted to the first syllable we get a substantive *k^m':xtos; the further development of this form into ka'matos can be described in various ways. I am on record for postulating two prop- vowels, before and after the cluster RH, i.e. something *ka'mxatos with coloration of the extra vowels by the laryngeal, so that these new vowels stay when the laryngeal is lost before vowel to leave precisely ka'matos. However, I now see a somewhat different possibility, namely normal development of the "syllabic m" into /a/ and a change to /ma/ of the final part of the old sequence mH2. That would come about by itself if, as would be natural, an accented syllabic sonant is a bit longer than an unaccented one, for then we get something like *k^m':mxtos, from where we expect a pre-Greek development like *ka'mxtos, whence, with the general change of H2 to a between consonants in Greek, the end-product ka'matos. I would still prefer the first of these alternative proposals, since syllabification of laryngeals is very strikingly similar all over and so just cannot be relegated to the individual histories of the separate branches (although this is precisely what has spread like a bushfire in the consensus among scholars of Indo-European in the past decade). Still, whichever way one chooses to view the change from *k^m':xtos to ka'matos, /a'ma/ obviously differs from /ma:/ by being more resolutely energetic; the segment is given a maximum of sonority right at the outset, as opposed to what it would get "by default" from the unmarked development of the underlying sequence anyway. That looks to me more like energy, i.e. stress, rather than tonal height. Also, the Greek accent limitation rules smack more of stress than of tonal height. One can easily understand that if you give the stress accent all you've got, you don't have breath for very much more word-length after the outburst, while it would be hard to understand that you could not go on speaking lower-key syllables after you had spoken a syllable on a high note - unless, of course, the high note is _very_ high and thus also demands all your energy. Barring such typological extremes, this looks very much like stress on the advance. I know that the Greek situation is not PIE, nor is that of Iranian. There are some suggestive indications of PIE stress in two facts, however: (1) The shortening of -VH to -V in vocatives: Ved. de'vi, Slav. z^eno, Gk. nu'mpha; (2) the gemination in hypochoristics, *attos, *attikos 'daddy'. These phenomena are both easily explained on the basis of a massive concentration of articulatory energy on the initial in words or wordforms used in calling or even shouting (the fashionable explanation of the vocatives by "laryngeal loss in absolute final" is just another case of collective, but irrational parrotlike repetition of some guru's reply given on the spur of the moment). Since the vocative has initial accent irrespective of the lexical place of the accent in the word-stem concerned (thus even Ved. pi'tar, Gk. pa'ter), we here find accent placing and stress-reflex correlated in a most illustrative way (nore also the gemination in the vocative-based Lat. Juppiter). Perhaps the Gordian knot is to be cut in the following way: There was a scale of phonetic registers in the language, the extreme cases being shouting and enclisis which display quite plain reductions, while in between the extremes the normal way of giving prominence to a syllable was by a somewhat higher tone - and, I'd say, a limited amount of extra articulatory energy (stress). In the further development of the languages, the emphatic pronunciations became the normal ones in many languages, and so the stress-based systems of Modern Greek and Pashto grew out of earlier systems in which the stress element was slighter. The stress element cannot have been nil, for then it would be incomprehensible that the syllable to receive stress would always be the one that earlier had the high tone. Note that the element of pitch cannot have been overly dominant in Vedic or Old Greek either, for - like stress - it is ignored in poetry which is based on syllable length only. This leaves us with a PIE system in which the prominent syllable of a given word was normally pronounced on an only slightly higher note and with only a slight degree of additional articulatory force, while in emphatic variants the stress part came to dominate more radically. How's that for a attempt to integrate the observations we can make? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 05:27:27 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 22:27:27 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stefan: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 10:37 PM > However, the Pashto vowel system is not *exactly* like the Sanskrit one, in > that it contains a phonemic schwa (which may be the short counterpart of > e:), which I overlooked, so for the parallel you were looking for, a > different language presents itself: Balochi [PR] Shamefully, I have misplaced my Balochi library. Could you share with us a bit on this? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 05:32:15 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 22:32:15 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Pete and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 12:14 PM >> 1) Sanskrit ... is more adequately described as: /a/, /a:/, /e:/, /i/, >> /i:/, /o:/, /u/, /u:/. > Sanskrit also had short (!!) [e] and [o] as allophones of /e/ and /o/ before > a non-elided initial /a/ - according to MacDonell, A Vedic Reader, p20. [PR] To my way of thinking, you have described a classic situation of a conditioned phone [e,o] of /e:,o:/ before initial {a-}. I am concerned only with the phonemic status of e:, o:. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 4 01:11:54 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:11:54 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 2:22 PM >>> .. pra-ugam >> To what IE root do you propose to attribute [-ugam]? > Hyeug - to yoke. Either the /y/ or the /H/ has caused hiatus here by > dropping out. This means that your "rule" for the combination /a + u/ is > not always true. [PR] I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. But, to explain the form, I think one looks first at OI yuga'-. Here the stress-accent has effected a zero-grade of the first syllable of the root, leaving avocalic /w/, which is realized as the phone [u]. With the stress-accent, we have forms like yo:'ga-. I think, in your example, the laryngeal is probably a part of the prefix, *pra:-, corresponding to Avestan fra:-. Therefore, I suggest that a late IE preH(3)-yeug-em was assimilated to 'preH(3)-H(3)ug-m, and that the doubled laryngeal was simplified to 'preH(3)-ug-m. Will that work for you? >> su-astaye. > The problem is again that your "rule" of consonant/vowel allophones doesn't > work and would need revising to cover cases like this. Perhaps you can > revise it without trouble - but in its present form, a succession of two > vowels is not possible. > Peter Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 4 22:54:33 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 00:54:33 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <003e01bf9a73$f1973b80$9c54113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: >>> I am under the impression that a consistent explanation ofIE /o/ has been >>> formulated: namely, that /e'/ becomes /o/ when the stress-accent is >>> transferred to another syllable. > [Rich Alderson:] >> The *pitch* accent, not the *stress* accent, at least if you are having >> recourse to Lehmann's theory of the vowel system. > [Pat Ryan:] > Correction accepted. Although, as we all know, the relationship of stress- > and tone-accents is gnarled. I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; the same goes for the intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). The unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. However, lengthened /e:/ does alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. The route to this /o:/ must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening induced by the nominative marker //-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. In stems with underlying long vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic complementary distribution). It is only in such forms that we find "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the ablaut worked. These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? Jens From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 3 18:42:04 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 21:42:04 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000331191302.00ae8c80@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 From: Stanley Friesen At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. >Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words >and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so >I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). Others have tried to explain the differnce as resulting from stressed and unstressed forms and thus provide a phonetic environment for the distribution rules. The question becomes how much grammatical information do you allow to affect the phonology. >One approach one can take in living languages is to check the >speaker's awareness of the distinction. Often an untrained >speaker is unaware of true allophonic distinctions. For >instance, the aspiration/non-aspiration of voiceless stops in >English is not generally even noticed by most speakers. It >usually has to be demonstrated to them before they can recognize >it. >On the other hand, most English speakers I know of seem to be >quite aware of the /th/ vs. /dh/ distinction. I'm sure that most English speakers recognize [th] and [dh] as different sounds. The question is do they recognize them as different phonemes. If you ask English speakers how the plural is formed they will say that you add -s to the word. Linguists know, however, that what is added in most cases is not -[es] but [ez]. This does not mean that the speaker is not aware of the distinction between [s] and [z]. The speaker is describing the spelling rule, not the pronunciation rule. Now at one time /z/ was not a phoneme distinct from /s/ in English. The pronunciation was predictable from the environment. The appearance of the two as morphophonemic variants, however, led to a phoneme split so that now /z/ is recognized as a phoneme, and so phonemic status is found only in words of recent origin, most of which are expressive in nature (sip ~ zip; sap ~ zap; fuss ~ fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 3 19:42:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:42:55 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in >> English Isn't there another minimal pair in ether : either (at least in some dialects)? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 23:31:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 18:31:33 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 2:27 PM >> .... But believe it >> or not, linguists will still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds >> and different analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes >> claimed for a particular language. [PG] > Interestingly, this has come up before on the list even with reference to > English - and in particular, the phonemicity of voiceless /w/ ("where" etc, > in some dialects) and c-cedilla in words like "hue". > If you want a minimal pair, I offer: hue ~ who; but even this does not > guarantee phonemic status for the initial sound in "hue". I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 06:14:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 09:14:12 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [Patrick Ryan wrote] >>>> True minimal pairs, a paltry requirement for phonemicity that would be >>>> undisputed in any other language. [Someone wrote] >>> Not at all. Many phonemes are accepted as such *without* minimal pairs >>> even in living languages. [Patrick Ryan] >> You assertion by itself does not convince me. >> Would you mind citing an example of any phoneme in any language that is not >> in a minimal pair? The criteria for establishing phonemes were already discussed, but I would like to point out another thing: in my opinion, minimal pairs are not a reasonable requirement to establishing phonemes when one is dealing with reconstructed proto-languages and not living languages. This is because only a fraction of the vocabulary can be reconstructed, and there probably aren't enough minimal pairs to establish the oppositions. The reconstructed PIE vocabulary is rather large, but if we look at PU with some 250-300 reconstructed roots, I seriously doubt it is possible to establish even half of the phoneme oppositions using minimal pairs. Ante Aikio From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 5 03:18:39 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 22:18:39 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 9:22 PM > At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: > And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as > reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the > very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). [PR] The real question to be answered is why /*o/ does not occur in verbal roots. It is this unanswered question, and the presence of /*o/ in inflected forms of verbal roots that show /*e/ that prompts the search for a conditioning factor. Actually, sinceI know your position, I was curious as to whether Larry Trask believes IE *o is phonemic. I hope he will answer the question soon. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 3 08:59:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 04:59:42 EDT Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) Message-ID: >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: >The reason for this, I think, lies in the fact that there has been extensive >reconvergence among the early forms of these stocks so that the original >branchings have been obscured. -- Occam's Razor would suggest that this may simply be a result of there not being much early differentiation. If Proto-Indo- European broke up sometime around 3000 B.C., then the western clump of dialects might well have remained fairly uniform for some time. As I said, my guess would be that around 2000 B.C. Baltic and Slavic certainly, and Germanic, italic and Celtic probably, just hadn't developed many of their later distinguishing characteristics. -something- then happened to the dialects which were going to become Proto-Germanic. When, where and why are obscure! >Yes, I grant you this. In fact (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic) almost looks like >a "which language doesn't belong here?" question. Sanskrit looks archaic >because, well, it's archaic -- as you say, it is at least 3000 years closer >to PIE than modern Lithuanian is. -- this is an interesting question. What I'd like to know -- and of course we can't know -- is what was going on with Baltic and Slavic [or more precisely, their ancestors] while Proto-Indo-Iranian was developing and apparently innovating like mad. We do know that they shared some of those innovations, but when did they become something other than "Late Proto-Indo-European"? >I would be willing to give more weight to the persistent connection with >Uralic as an indication of not having moved much. -- luckily, we have both... 8-). >Using Amerind influence on English as an example, words taken into the >superstratum will typically be toponyms (Mississippi, Mississinewa, Missouri) >or words for local flora (squash) and fauna (woodchuck, chipmunk) or local >implements (moccasin, tomahawk, wampum, wigwam) or institutions (powwow) that >the superstratum language lacks. Other words will tend to be used >pejoratively or for comic effect (papoose, squaw, mugwump). -- well, that isn't entirely comparable to most Old World cases of linguistic succession. English-speaking Europeans more or less blotted out the Native Americans along the Eastern seaboard of North America. Due as much to imported diseases as anything else, there was no prolonged period of bilingualism, nor were there many cases of non-native English speakers being linguistically assimilated. I understand that there was considerably more influence from the indigenous languages of Mexico on popular Spanish there -- although I'm operating from memory, and distant memory at that. By way of contrast, it's generally accepted that very large numbers of the Celtic-speaking British population survived the Anglo-Saxon invasions. I must admit, I am rather puzzled by the lack of substrate influence on Old English. It's not as if the Anglo-Saxons had some sort of a linguistic Academy to try and keep out loan-words, much less distinctive accents or the inevitable influence of syntax which occurs when non - native speakers acquire a second language in adulthood. >And at the expense of Slavic too, but that also is a different matter. --more of a new period, actually. Prior to 1000 AD or so, it was the other way round. Gothic, for example, started out in what is now Poland. The migration period after the fall of the Roman Empire saw the Germanics moving south and west and the western fringe of the Slavic peoples moving into the vacated territory. >>-- true; although, of course, we know that German is much closer >>geographically to the proto-Germanic _urheimat_. >But not *in* the Germanic Urheimat. --certainly the north and west of the Urheimat. It is generally accepted that Jutland and the area of Germany immediately to the south of it were part of the earliest area of Germanic speech. Granted that large areas of southern Germany were Celtic in the last centuries of the pre Christian era. >No, it is only after the Norman Conquest that the loans become easily >noticeable. There are a lot of loans from Scandinavian in English that >predate the Norman Conquest that most native speakers don't even recognize as >loans. --yes, of course, there were Scandinavian loans in pre-conquest English, although less so in the Wessex dialect that was the chancery language in Anglo-Saxon times. I should have mentioned that; although as you say those were more in the nature of cross-dialect influence. What I meant to refer to was the enormous freight of romance and other loans which came in after 1066. Also the time when other aspects of the language began to shift rapidly. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 07:59:20 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 10:59:20 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 2 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > Yes, and it would seem that Baltic (or one of its previous > manifestations) has pretty much always been in contact with > Uralic. First we have the evidence of contact between PIE and > PU, then there are the Old Iranian loans at the PFU level, I would like to correct the above slightly. There are no Iranian loans in Proto-Finno-Ugric; there are however some Pre-Aryan (and perhaps Proto-Aryan) ones. Moreover, it is disputed whether there ever was a Finno-Ugric proto-language (distinct from PU). If this was not the case (as I believe it wasn't), the Aryan loans lacking in Samoyedic were borrowed separately into and between the already differentiated "FU" languages. Since most of the show irregular sound correspondence, this seems likely. > but > there are also Slavic loans in all the FU languages (but not, > apparently, inherited from the proto-language, and who can really > tell the difference between Slavic and Baltic at this stage). > Then there are the sprachbund effects leading right down to the > present day when Baltic and Balto-Finnic are still in contact. The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. - Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 3 09:14:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 05:14:17 EDT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/00 3:07:20 AM Mountain Daylight Time, Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: << It's indeed crucial: What really are 'certain shared innovations'? They are never 'certain'. >> -- the use of the word "certain" here means "_a set of_ shared innovations", not "assured/incontestible innovations". From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 08:27:10 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 11:27:10 +0300 Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Lithuania?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > The tree model has > severe limitations and it is important to be aware of what these > limitations are. Perhaps all trees should be required to have > a warning label something like "WARNING: This tree does not > reflect reality except in certain narrow areas. Do not try to > apply this tree to real life situations." or "WARNING: This > tree is an abstraction based on limited data. Prolonged use > without constant reference to the data may be hazardous to your > mental health." It happens all too often that it is not taken into account what a family tree represents and what it doesn't. As Anthony Fox (Linguistic Reconstruction, 1995) put rather elegantly, "the wave model simply provides the means by which languages may split, whereas the tree represents the result of the split". It is an error to interpret a family tree as a straightforward depiction of how the languages in reality did split from each other. > Even so, the tree model is still useful for certain things so it > can't really be dispensed with. And anything that provides a > better model of the features that the tree doesn't, will probably > distort the features that are made clear by the tree, as well as > running the risk of being too complex to be comprehensible (e.g., > isogloss maps or dialect geography). The tree model cannot be dispensed with because it actually is implicit in the comparative method itself. I can't see how the method could be practiced without an underlying assumtion of a family tree. But you of course mean whether it is useful to use the family tree as a tool for illustrating genetic relationships. I'd say no, unless one constantly bears in mind the warnings you gave above :) There are some sorry examples, e.g. the traditional binary family tree of the Uralic languages. In retrospect, I'd say that it was a hindrance to the progress of Uralistics, but nevertheless its justification remained unquestioned for almost 100 years. Regards, Ante Aikio From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 3 11:39:46 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 13:39:46 +0200 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <200003310951.p4772@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > [...] > I would like to stress that no comparative linguist accepts any publication > combined with the names 'Shevoroshkin', Starostin, Bengtson, Ruhlen..... > [...] Then please accept my resignation from the guild, for I'd like to go on being inspired by work done by scholars like these who are not afraid to present an idea for consideration before the matter has advanced to the point of being self-evident. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From jamm at primus.com.au Mon Apr 3 23:11:12 2000 From: jamm at primus.com.au (peter edwards) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 07:11:12 +0800 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Hello. With all due respect - one ought not to criticize some one's ability especially when you don't use the conjunction 'nor' correctly. 'Neither' would have been better. Eg: sound correspondences nor [sic] in lexico... . 'Nor' replaces 'and not'. Peter Edwards Editor-in-Chief Melbourne Palate, Food & Wine Magazine ---------- > From: Hans Holm > Date: Friday, March 31, 2000 3:51 PM [ moderator snip ] > These 'lumpers' do not have any competence in e.g. sound correpondences nor > in lexicostatistics at all. Most list members discussing laryngeals in IE > roots will not even react on this 'recommendation'. > Regards > Hans J. Holm > D-30629 Hannover From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 4 03:40:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 22:40:31 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear Hans and IEists: [ moderator snip ] [PR] I must say that I am rather surprised to see the work of several linguists dismissed without a reading --- solely on the strength of their alleged lack of expertise. Since Peiros was not specifically named in the blanket indictment, I still suggest that list-members read the essay, and judge for themselves whether competence of the craft is demonstrated in the article. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 10:50:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 13:50:08 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: > In the various IE handbooks, I've seen a number of phonetic solutions > proposed for the problem of what the laryngeals were phonetically, but all of > them look like typologically odd sets of sounds given standard > reconstructions for PIE. > In the '70s and '80s, phonological typology was called on pretty heavily to > motivate the glottalic hypothesis for PIE. I'm puzzled about the near > absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic > values of the laryngeals might have been. > Have I missed obvious sources? Has there been discussion of the typology of > laryngeals? I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be reconstructed (/x´ x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > [S]. Regards, Ante Aikio From g_sandi at hotmail.com Tue Apr 4 11:03:12 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 16:33:12 +0530 Subject: Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse" Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: proto-language Sent: Wednesday, 29 March, 2000 5:32 AM > Dear Gabor and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Gabor Sandi" > Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 9:36 AM >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: proto-language >> Sent: Saturday, 25 March, 2000 4:10 PM >>> Dear Gabor and IEists: >> [ moderator snip ] > [GS] >> Gimbutas's arguments are based on >> archaeology, as well as a certain amount of theorizing that goes along with >> any innovative scientific thinking. There are many linguists who accept the >> Kurgan hypothesis - probably more than those who reject it outright. > [PR] > My problem with Gimbutas is not the Kurgan Hypothesis per se but the > extraneous ideological interpretation she attached to the bare > archaeological facts. [GS} But aren't there extraneous ideological interpretations on the other side as well? Reading through Renfrew, Whittle et al. I can't help noticing a very strong resistance to the ideas that (1) populations can move from one area to another, displacing, swallowing or simply eliminating the previous inhabitants; and (2) one language can displace another, either through process (1), or - even without major population displacement - by having people switch from one language to another, for whatever reason. The archaeological buzzword is "process archaeology", which seems to claim that, in general, populations may go through major changes in pottery, burial customs, agriculture and housing without any major change in their ethnic identity (including language). For example, it is claimed that when the major archaeological culture of the North European plain switched from TRB to Corded Ware, there was no change in language (otherwise Renfrew's hypothesis is refuted, at least for this region). The argument is purely ideological. There can of course be language switch even if the material culture remains the same. For example, I doubt that there are any archaeological signs of the switch from Cornish to English in Cornwall in the 17th-18th centuries, or - for that matter - of the switch from Irish to English in Ireland during the 19th and early 20th centuries (aside from the small remnants in the Gaeltacht). I would say that when there is a major cultural switch, a language shift is even more likely. Insofar as Gimbutas's idealization of Old Europe is concerned, I am skeptical. Just because people worshipped a mother Goddess and had superb pottery does not mean that their society was all that pleasant for everyone. The poor peasant lad born on the wrong side of the mud-track might well have preferred the exciting life and opportunities offered by some hero-worshipping horsemen moving to the area, and for all we know this might have contributed to the success of the Indo-Europeans. But all this is my supposition, and I certainly would not advocate it as dogma. The biggest gap in the Kurgan theory is the apparent lack of cultural continuity between groups of IE speakers that are supposed to have had a linear historical relation. E.g. Kurgan > Globular Amphora, Balkan Bronze > Greek Bronze, etc. Although Gimbutas et al. try valiently to show that some artifacts (say, burial mounds) do show such continuity, the evidence is certainly debatable. However, similar gaps exist with the Neolithic IE hypothesis as well. In the final analysis, language switching must have occurred somewhere along the line, the question is: where (or rather when?) With best wishes, Gabor From g_sandi at hotmail.com Tue Apr 4 11:43:32 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 17:13:32 +0530 Subject: Brahui Message-ID: [GS] >From Gabor Sandi mailto:g_sandi at hotmail.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Anthony Appleyard Sent: Tuesday, 28 March, 2000 10:32 PM > Brahui is a Dravidian language spoken in a most unexpected place :: > Baluchistan, which is a northwest part of Pakistan. Such an outlier weighs > on the history of the IE-descended and other languages in the area. I have > heard two theories re Brahui:- > (1) It is a valuable relic of a time when Dravidian was spoken over much of > India. > (2) The Brahui-speakers are descended from soldiers that were raised in > Dravidian South India fairly recently and dumped in Baluchistan when no > longer needed. As such, their language is irrelevant here. > Which is true? [GS] As I happen to live in India right now, I have been able to collect a fair amount of information on this topic, some of it not easily reachable in the west. I don't think anyone can answer your question "Which is true?" - the truth of the matter is probably undecidable, given the insufficient amount of data. All we can talk about is probabilities, and the consensus on this seems to point at answer (2) above. Perhaps the best summary of this view is by Josef Elfenbein, one of the top experts on Brahui, who says in Chapter 14 ("Brahui") of Steever (1998): "Brahui prehistory is entirely obscure. I have argued against the traditional assumption that Brahuis are a relic of the original Dravidian migrations into India, c. 3000 BCE, who remained in Kalat as the first group to separate from the other Dravidians. In my view a more prosaic history is far more likely. The Brahuis, never a very close-knit group, migrated northwest from the central Deccan in India across Gujarat and into Sindh in many waves from about 800-1100 CE. Afterwards they entered the Kalat highlands." (p.389) In further discussion, Elfenbein claims that Brahui is a North Dravidian language closely related to Kurux (spoken in the states of Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh) and Malto (spoken in Bihar and West Bengal). This close relationship is also stated by Zograph (1982). Elfenbein's views on the origin of Brahui are also accepted by Sergent (1997), pp.129-130. This scholar refers to evidence provided by Elfenbein (I don't have the source myself) that all Indo-Iranian loanwords into Brahui are from Baluchi, a language with which Brahui has a long history of symbiosis, which is a language that was introduced from further west into what is now Pakistan only in the 13th century AD at the earliest. Had Brahui been in the area before the arrival of Baluchi, we would of course expect loanwords from other Indo-Iranian languages as well, say from Pashto or Sindhi. The only scholar I could find who supports the theory of the Brahui being present in the area from Harappan times on is Parpola (1994). Parpola is a scholar who has long claimed that the Harappans were Dravidian speakers - a theory that is not discredited at all, in my view, even if the Brahui are recent arrivals in Baluchistan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Parpola, Asko (1994). Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge University Press. Sergent, Bernard (1997). Genese de l'Inde [Genesis of India]. Paris: Payot. Steever, Sanford [ed] (1998). The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge. Zograph, G.A. (1982). Languages of South Asia. London: Routledge. > How much is Dravidian related to Elamite, as I have heard ideas of? [GS] I think that Elamite is so little known that no solid theorizing is possible. An article on the topic (unfortunately I don't have access to it) is: McAlpin, David, "Towards Proto-Elamo-Dravidian". Language 50:89-101. > Where does the word "Dravidian" come from? [GS] >From Sanskrit drbviDa / draviDa (D stands for the retroflex d). This is a borrowing of a Dravidian word related to Tamil "tamiR" (R is r with two dots under it), meaning "the Tamil language, the Tamils". For all its cognates, see the appropriate entry in Burrow & Emenau (1998): A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. > As regards the idea that the language of the Indus valley civilization was > Dravidian, I read once that:- > (1) Two Indus Valley gambling dices were found, and on their faces were > pictures of things whose names resembled the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 in > Dravidian. > (2) Over time more and more Dravidian words get into Indian Sanskrit > writings, but no more in the Andhra period and after, as if that is when the > lower castes in the north of India finally forgot their old Dravidian > languages. > What is usual opinion about this? [GS] No comments on this for now. Best wishes, Gabor Sandi From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 3 16:35:09 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 16:35:09 GMT Subject: Tonal and stress accents Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote about IE stress. The image that I had was this: IE originally has a pitch accent, and it had no zero-grading, and the IE-speakers hunted on foot on the steppes. They domesticated animals including the horse, and that lead them into a period of expansion; as they absorbed speakers of other languages around, foreign influences including stress accent got in. Pitch accent later reasserted itself, but while the stress accent was current, zero-grading came in by the common weakening of unstressed vowels. Before that, word forms that are distinguished by zero grade / normal grade in classical IE were distinguished by accent only: {!elEIqwom} = "I was leaving"; {!eleiqwOm} > {!eliqwOm} = "I left". Some of the other peoples absorbed in that time likely had no laryngeals in their own old languages, and that may be why later IE often lost laryngeals. From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Fri Apr 7 06:59:16 2000 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 08:59:16 +0200 Subject: PIE origins of 'sinus'..... Message-ID: Does anyone happen to know the PIE root(s) of 'sinus' (a curvature, flexure, bend; a cavity within a bone, esp. within the bones of the face, connecting with the nasal cavities) and the obsolete 'sinuate' "to creep or crawl in a winding course", which have come down to English via Latin and/or French? Given that the verb 'snake' (<*sneg-) is defined as "to follow a twisting or winding course; creep, crawl", is the hypothesis of an etymological link with PIE *sneg- "to creep, crawl" tenable, reflexes coming down in zero-grade form (*sn-) via Germanic and in full-grade form (*sVn-) via Latin/French? Many thanks, Dennis. From chris at mail.syrinx.com.au Thu Apr 6 05:59:00 2000 From: chris at mail.syrinx.com.au (Dr ChRIS CLEiRIGh) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 15:59:00 +1000 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. > Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" > at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically > conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to > insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite > the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks > more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). > Others have tried to explain the differnce as resulting from > stressed and unstressed forms and thus provide a phonetic > environment for the distribution rules. The question becomes how > much grammatical information do you allow to affect the > phonology. > I'm sure that most English speakers recognize [th] and [dh] as > different sounds. The question is do they recognize them as > different phonemes. If you ask English speakers how the plural > is formed they will say that you add -s to the word. Linguists > know, however, that what is added in most cases is not -[es] but > [ez]. This does not mean that the speaker is not aware of the > distinction between [s] and [z]. The speaker is describing the > spelling rule, not the pronunciation rule. Now at one time /z/ > was not a phoneme distinct from /s/ in English. The > pronunciation was predictable from the environment. The > appearance of the two as morphophonemic variants, however, led to > a phoneme split so that now /z/ is recognized as a phoneme, and > so phonemic status is found only in words of recent origin, most > of which are expressive in nature (sip ~ zip; sap ~ zap; fuss ~ > fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same > relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable > environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic > basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new > coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the > speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). Does your dialect recognise a distinction between `teeth' and `teethe'? chris From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 05:10:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 22:10:26 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:42 PM 4/3/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" >at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically >conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to >insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite >the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks >more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). You mean 'teeth'-'teethe'? That looks like a fine minimal pair to me. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Apr 6 07:49:01 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 08:49:01 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: >> At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: > >> And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as >> reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the >> very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). No; I didn't write this. Somebody else did. I have expressed no views at all on the phonemes of PIE. > Actually, sinceI know your position, I was curious as to whether Larry Trask > believes IE *o is phonemic. > I hope he will answer the question soon. Sorry, but I am not an IEist, and I have no view on this matter. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 5 02:54:00 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 21:54:00 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 1:00 PM > On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Larry Trask wrote: >>> [PRp] >>> Sorry, I just cannot accept that. If /o/ is an IE phoneme, it should occur >>> in true minimal pairs. I have this on the authority of a degreed linguist >>> with whom I have consulted on this question. Your reluctance to accept this >>> basic method of establishing a phoneme continues to amaze me! [LT] >> This is *a* method of establishing phonemes. But it is not *the only* >> method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of two sounds cannot >> be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme. [RW] > I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to > establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [PR] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. [RW] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English minimal pair > 'thigh' / 'thy' > (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] > is clearly marginal) > Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in > English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless > claim that there has been a phomemic split similar to what occurred with > /s/ and /z/). That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic status for both. > This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] > occuring in voiced environments [PR] What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [RW] > and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. [PR] I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological conditioning factors. [RW] > Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot > be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but also > 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they can't > be assigned to separate phonemes.' [PR] I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [RW] > Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but contrastive > environments are a clincher. [PR] I find this totally unacceptable. Show me contrastive phonological environments. [RW] > As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, similar items that > are in complementary distribution are usually aspects of the same thing. But > believe it or not, linguists will still disagree on the phonemic status of > sounds and different analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes > claimed for a particular language. [PR] Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Apr 7 05:17:29 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 17:17:29 +1200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>> Robert Whiting 04/04 6:42 AM >>> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 From: Stanley Friesen At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several days without anyone questioning the original statement about complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur, etc etc. [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly controversial view ("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken as a simple fact. Ross Clark From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 13:34:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:34:59 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <001401bf9dc4$c02eb2e0$2dd31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 06:31 PM 4/3/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Peter and IEists: >[PG] >> Interestingly, this has come up before on the list even with reference to >> English - and in particular, the phonemicity of voiceless /w/ ("where" etc, >> in some dialects) and c-cedilla in words like "hue". >> If you want a minimal pair, I offer: hue ~ who; but even this does not >> guarantee phonemic status for the initial sound in "hue". >I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. >In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. That is also my analysis: c-cedilla is an allophone of [h] before a /y/, in this case from the "long=u", /yu:/. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:38:00 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:38:00 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pat said: > I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. > In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we also actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure into which potential phonemes fit. Peter From brent at bermls.oau.org Thu Apr 6 10:25:55 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:25:55 -0400 Subject: English phones [th] and [dh] (was: minimal pairs) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 09:42:04PM +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: . . . > fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same > relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable > environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic > basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new > coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the > speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). What about ether versus either? -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 6 15:08:57 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:08:57 +0200 Subject: th/dh: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > [Quote from earlier posting:] >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair [...] because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. Stanley Friesen :] >> Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words >> and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so >> I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. Robert Whiting: > [] The question becomes how > much grammatical information do you allow to affect the > phonology. [...] This is an illustrative discussion. Basically, it boils down to asking what the term phoneme means. And if you have only phonemes and non-phonemes in a black-and-white world, and everybody is at liberty to draw the line as he pleases, you are not likely to reach any kind of agreement. But as soon as you enter the world of nuances and degrees, you can soon agree on HOW close English th and dh are to being phonemically identical. That is the objective stuff progress is made of. There are similar impossible, and so eternal, discussions about the placing of syllable boundaries, about syllabicity vs. lack of it, the number of vowel phonemes demanded by a language, or even same-language : dialect : different-language. Such matters must be viewed on a scale to make any sense beyond the reason for quarrels. Jens From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Apr 6 09:55:23 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:55:23 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <009801bf9d2d$4d770c80$fcd21b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> However, the Pashto vowel system is not *exactly* like the Sanskrit one, in >> that it contains a phonemic schwa (which may be the short counterpart of >> e:), which I overlooked, so for the parallel you were looking for, a >> different language presents itself: Balochi > [PR] >Shamefully, I have misplaced my Balochi library. >Could you share with us a bit on this? What do you want me to share ? A concise grammar of Balochi ? Since it is an Indo-European language it would be bad manners to teach the essentials of this trade on a list like this ;-) The issue at issue is the number and nature of vowel phonemes present in the language. It is identical to that of Sanskrit: a, i, i, a:, i:, u:, e, o (the latter two inherently long). As far as I remember you categorically denied the possibility that such a system could exist. Now, it does, which removes every further claim you are building or trying to build on this unsubstantiated claim. As always ;-) St. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:16:40 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:16:40 +0100 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: >> Sanskrit short [e] and [o] > > To my way of thinking, you have described a classic situation of a > conditioned phone [e,o] of /e:,o:/ before initial {a-}. Yes, of course. I met another interesting example of /e/ just this morning: RV 1:154:1. The whole line goes: vicakrama:nas tredhoruga:yah. "having strode out - triply - wide-paced" The metre requires 11 syllables, and there are only ten. The usual recourse here is to separate out the resolved syllables in sandhi - here the o after dh. But Macdonnell says of tredha:, "The first syllable [tre..] must be pronounced ... equivalent to two short syllables; the resolution tredha: uruga:yah would produce both an abnormal break and an abnormal cadence". So there's /e/ pronounced as two short syllables. Anyone wish to suggest it's /ai/? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:29:15 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:29:15 +0100 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: >> Hyeug - to yoke. > I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. I have been hunting through my notes, and I'm not sure now either! I picked it up from somewhere, without keeping a record of who suggested it. I only have a note that Sanskrit occasionally has a long augment before this root a:yunak, and a reference to the Greek development in /dzugon/, which one or two people have suggested shows an initial Hy cluster (#Hy > /dz/, #y > /h/). And my Sanskrit books show no sign of a long augment! Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 10 03:42:00 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 22:42:00 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:54 PM >>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: [PR] To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I support with some reservations: "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented formerly received a secondary pitch accent." Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. Lehmann's position is maintained more recently (1993) in his _Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics_, where he writes on page 131: "Deflectyed grade is explained by loss of primary accent on a vowel and replacement by a secondary accent. If in derivation the accent fell on an affix rather than on the root, the root vowel under such secondary accent changed to o, as in Greek nomo's "pasture," nomeu's "shepherd" in contrast with the vowel of the accented root in the verb ne'mo: "I pasture". Though Jens may assert correctly that I personally am not as familiar with the literature as he is, I sincerely doubt whether Jens would be justified in asserting the same for Professor Lehmann. [JR] > I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the > /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; [PR] Perfect As Lehmann sees it, *o' is the result of a secondary tone-accent of a stress- and tone-accent stage that was preceded by stress-accent stage. During the combined stress- and tone-accent stage, a hypothetical perfect 1. p. s. *we'id-eH(2) would have become, in the plural, 1. p. p. *wid-me', with the full- and zero-grades being the result of the stress-accent while the tone-accents (marked by ') shifted from the root-syllable to the affix. As is well known, the perfect "often, but not always, had reduplication". Therefore, the easiest explanation for the *o of the attested *wo'id-eH(2) is to assume that it is the simplification of an originally reduplicated form: *we'-woid-eH(2) with the reduplicating syllable receriving the primary tone-accent and root-syllable receiving a secondary tone-accent, analogous with *de'-dork-eH(2) [Greek de'dorka]. [JR] > the same goes for the > intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has > o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). [PR] In Beekes, I see no *o-vocalism in intensive reduplication (*we'r-w(e)rt-, 'to turn'; and I am not familiar with the IE reduplicated aorist (Beekes lists only three types: stem, thematic, and sigmatic) --- could you give an example? As for reduplicated presents, I cannot put my finger on an example without a final root laryngeal, which complicates the pictures. But if you have an example of root *Ce'C- and reduplicated present: *Ce'CoC-, the same explanation as above for the perfect could be applied. [JR] > unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, [PR] We are, if Lehmann is correct, dealing with *two* phenomena: 1) changes brought about by tone-accent shifts; and 2) changes brought about by stress-accent shifts. Without specifying exactly which you have in mind, statements become problematical to interpret. [JR] > cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. > *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an > optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like > *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; > ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is > *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other > examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. [PR] That is exactly what we should expect as a result of the shift of stress-accent from *e. [JR] > However, lengthened /e:/ does > alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to > *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem > eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if > the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not > by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply > unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their > accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. [PR] I find the "contrast" between "deaccented" and "simply unaccented" unconvincing based on the examples given since the data could be explained as simply as due to the different times during which the compounds were formed: lime:'n at a time when the affix was stress-accented; a'kmo:n at a time when secondary tonal accent produced *o. What seems important from the examples is that the affix -*men at one time had both the stress- and tone-accents. Also, in the case of *swe'so:r, a component of *ser-, 'female', has been proposed (see Pokorny p. 911, under 4. *ser-). [JR] > The route to this /o:/ > must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening > induced by the nominative marker file://-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing > but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. [PR] Frankly, lengthened variants of reduced vowels need a swipe of Occam's razor. [JR] > In stems with underlying long > vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. > *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but > acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of > the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the > /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. [PR] Well, this explanation does not explain Latin pe:s very well. And the situation of *de/e:m-/*do/o:m- is so fluid that another example would surely be better. [JR] > - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic > vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the > accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what > follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but > plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: > /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form > before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you > look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced > segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s > of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in > the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have > been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. [PR] I would gladly grant the IE *-s (2. p. sing.), which I derive from earlier /s[h]o/ has a different origin from nominative *-s, which I derive from earlier /so/. But I cannot accept that voicing of a root-final obstruent determines the quality of the root-vowel --- at least, consistently, for we have *pe/e:d- and *de/e:m- alongside *po/o:d- and *do/o:m-. [JR] > - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the > causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very > great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the > /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. > an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, > developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic > complementary distribution). [PR] It is the firmest of my beliefs that IE had *no* infixes. An only apparent exception is the *metathesized* -n- in certain present stems. [JR] > It is only in such forms that we find > "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, > because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and > found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer > any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a > phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen > as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where > there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were > fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. > *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the > ablaut worked. [PR] A rather complicated solution when Lehmann's simple solution is at hand: *me'n- + *e'ye- -> *mone'ye-. [JR] > These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of > examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their > actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is > shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? [PR] And when will you cease patronizing condescension? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru Thu Apr 6 05:22:37 2000 From: KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru (KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 09:22:37 +0400 Subject: The Indo-European Database Message-ID: Dear Indo-Europeanists, Re: The Indo-European Database online A new scientific project was launched this week on the Web. Ten leading websites devoted to linguistic, historical and cultural studies of Europe and Asia merged to create The Indo-European Database, the widest and most reliable source of academic knowledge about Indo-European languages, history, archaeology, and mythology. The Indo-European Database (TIED) introduces a wide range of brand new issues of research in linguistic and historical area, grammars and glossaries, publications and etymologies written and collected by the Members. Joint projects will be implemented in the field of Indo-European studies. Besides, the Indo-European Forum, a part of TIED, acting since September, 1999, has been renovated to satisfy all needs of the interested audience. The Indo-European Database is open for new Members and Authors who would like to contribute to the research of social sciences and who is willing to carry new ideas and theories to the audience. The Database is a non-commercial project, all its materials are free for everyone. See The Indo-European Database at: http://indoeuropean.cjb.net Russian version available at: http://indoeuropean.da.ru See the Indo-European Forum also at: http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist Cyril Babaev TIED Administrator KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 6 19:29:39 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:29:39 -0600 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <051e90513210340ISPSRV17@mail02.iprimus.com.au> Message-ID: > With all due respect - one ought not to criticize some one's ability > especially when you don't use the conjunction 'nor' correctly. 'Neither' > would have been better. Eg: sound correspondences nor [sic] in lexico... . > 'Nor' replaces 'and not'. This type of comment is not appropriate to our discussions. Many of our colleagues here are non-native speakers of English and the prescriptive injunction which is being declared as a mark of intelligence here is not even a part of most native speaker's grammars. [ Moderator's note: Prof. McLaughlin is entirely correct, and I apologize to the entire reader- ship, and more especially to Mr. Holm, for allowing this to go out. --rma ] John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 6 19:54:49 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:54:49 -0600 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <008701bf9de7$9dbeda00$2dd31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Pat Ryan wrote] > I must say that I am rather surprised to see the work of several linguists > dismissed without a reading --- solely on the strength of their alleged lack > of expertise. I must agree with Pat here. The term "lumpers" is exceptionally misleading since many of the shining stars of our craft (at least in the history of linguistics in North America) were dedicated "lumpers" during the 30's, 40's, 50's, and well into the 60's and as late as the 70's. Names like Edward Sapir, Mary Haas, Carl Voegelin, Benjamin Whorf, George Trager, and others were all lumpers in the middle part of the last century. Even today, besides the obvious "lumpers" who get most of the publicity, there are scholars to do high-quality work in other areas of linguistics who are dipping into the waters of "lumping". Pam Munro and Sydney Lamb spring immediately to mind. In Native American studies, the whole idea of the "Penutian" stock was considered unprovable and a bad idea 20 years ago to most Amerindianists. There had even been some good studies that most American linguists took as a firm disproof of the notion. But a group of good scholars continued to work with the topic and have published some very sound conclusions about the genetic and areal relations on the West Coast that have validated some parts of the Penutian hypothesis. They have convinced many conservative scholars in the field because of their sound methodology. Our fellow lister, Scott DeLancey, comes to mind immediately in this group. An entire issue of the journal International Journal of American Linguistics was devoted to the topic a few issues back. So we can't just dismiss "lumpers" out of hand because they are some very vaguely defined body of scholars who are pushing the boundaries of our traditionally accepted language families. Some popular "lumpers" are not using really sound methodology in their work (Greenberg & co.), but the lesser known "lumpers" are using very sound methodology indeed. Perhaps we really need to distinguish between those "lumpers" who only publish working papers with possibly suggestive and unsifted data (Greenberg, et al.) and those who publish finished proofs with well-analyzed and evaluated data. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 6 22:06:32 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:06:32 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 6:39 AM > On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Hans Holm wrote: >> [...] >> I would like to stress that no comparative linguist accepts any publication >> combined with the names 'Shevoroshkin', Starostin, Bengtson, Ruhlen..... >> [...] > Then please accept my resignation from the guild, for I'd like to go on > being inspired by work done by scholars like these who are not afraid to > present an idea for consideration before the matter has advanced to the > point of being self-evident. > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen I would like to whole-heartedly endorse Jens' position here. Jens himself has had some imaginative ideas that are worthy of serious consideration; and I am thinking long and hard about possible adequate answers to his last posting on *e/*o. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From alderson at netcom.com Thu Apr 6 18:29:44 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:29:44 -0700 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <200003310951.p4772@h2.maus.de> (Hans_Holm@h2.maus.de) Message-ID: While I have not had the pleasure of meeting the others named by Mr. Holm, I studied Anatolian linguistics with Prof. Shevoroshkin for an entire semester. Although I was not interested in the (Illic^-Svityc^) Nostratic etymologies proposed for various difficult Lycian, Lydian, or Carian items, my overall impression of him was positive: He clearly is an excellent linguist with a strong grasp of the methodologies of historical linguistics. I would not even rule out a work associated with Mr. Ruhlen without at least a cursory examination. I daresay most list members are as tolerant as I... Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 13:45:25 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:45:25 -0700 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:50 PM 4/4/00 +0300, Ante Aikio wrote: >I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but >another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. >I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may >tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are >etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) >*h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic >(retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be >reconstructed (/x´ x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for >*h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution >[?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. I, too, for other reasons, have drifted away from H1 as [?]. I am not sure whether this counts as typological reasoning, but I strongly lean towards a labialized H3 on the basis of parallelism with the labialized obstruents. So, my current "best guess" for the laryngeals is something like yours, /x', x, x^w/, or /h, x, x^w/. (With /x/ being a *back* fricative, and /x'/ or /h/ being less far back). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 6 17:27:56 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 19:27:56 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > [Quoting the 25 Mar 2000 posting by Herb Stahlke:] >> I'm puzzled about the near >> absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic >> values of the laryngeals might have been. [...] > [Ante Aiko:] [...] > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are > etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) > *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic > (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be > reconstructed (/x´ x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for > *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution > [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves, and make very good sense typologically as well. A voiced value of /H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; the assimilation in Germanic *kwikw-a-z 'quick' demands its being velar, and its o-coloration makes it round, ergo this was a "rounded gamma", a voiced labiovelar fricative. The cases of /H2/ surfacing as /k/ (costa, koza), and its Anatolian reflexes makes it a dorsal fricative, evidence like Skt. gen. patha's makes it voiceless and h-like, and its a-coloration demands some degree of aperture; in sum, this was a voiceless velar or postvelar fricative without lip-rounding. Both /H2/ and /H3/ cause a preceding high vowel to undergo lowering in its final part in Greek, Armenian and Tocharian, while /H1/ does no such thing: the products of /iH2, iH3/ are Gk. /ja:, jo:/, Arm. /ya/, Toch. /ya:/, while /iH1/ simply yields /i:/. That means no particularly marked degree of aperture. Note that also a preceding /o/ is left unaffected, /oH1/ giving simple /o:/ all over the place; this means no particularly marked degree of closenes either. The riddle is solve by the observation that, after /H1/ and /H2/, but not efter /H3/, the suffix *-tlo-/*-tro- turns up aspirated: Lat. cri:brum, fa:bula, but po:culum. It is customary to derive Lat. -br-/-bl- and Gk. -thr-/-thl- from IE *-dhr-/*-dhl-, but Birgit Olsen suggests IE *-thr-/*-thl- with voiceless aspirates which are not excluded by any material we know. Thus, both H1 and H2 aspirate, at least a _following_ /t/, and /H1/ causes no "breaking" in the development of i/u + H, while H2 and H3 do. The only phonetic value that accomodates all of these observations is a plain [h], i.e. a simple voiceless continuation of the preceding vowel. The set [h], [x], [{ghw}] is very close to Dutch which has [h], [x] and [{gh}], while in many languages gamma is rounded, cf., e.g., the development underlying the orthography of English law, corresponding to Danish lov (Swedish lag). I have therefore bee preaching this set for quite many years (on record since 1982, I see), often against heavy criticism. I now see the very same set advocated, without explicit reasons, in Meier-Bru"gger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Has the gospel been heard? At any rate, the agreement is nice to see. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 6 22:20:25 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:20:25 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:50 AM > On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> In the various IE handbooks, I've seen a number of phonetic solutions >> proposed for the problem of what the laryngeals were phonetically, but all >> of them look like typologically odd sets of sounds given standard >> reconstructions for PIE. >> In the '70s and '80s, phonological typology was called on pretty heavily >> to motivate the glottalic hypothesis for PIE. I'm puzzled about the near >> absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic >> values of the laryngeals might have been. >> Have I missed obvious sources? Has there been discussion of the typology >> of laryngeals? > I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but > another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are > etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) > *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic > (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be > reconstructed (/x4 x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for > *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution > [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. [PR] I think a ready earliest pattern, the source of which will remain respectfully nameless, would indicate: /*h, *H (he:), *$ ('ain), *?/ although by slightly later times, what seems to me like a natural development would be: /*h, *x, *Y (gamma), *0/ which seems to correspond fairly well to the Uralic facts: perhaps: /*h, *0/ -> *k(2); /*Y/ -> *x; /*x/ (if palatalized before *e) -> /*S/ Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Apr 11 15:56:17 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 15:56:17 GMT Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: I am tempted to believe that H3 was the Arabic ayin sound, and H2 was its voiceless equivalent sometimes written as "h" with a dot under and sometimes as "2", i.e. epiglottal fricatives. This is from (1) the a-flavoring tendency of H2 and the o-flavoring tendency of H3, which matches the tendency of the epiglottals (at least in my mouth) when I tried learning Arabic, and (2) IE / Semitic equations such as Greek odussomai = "I hate" < IE H3-d-w, compare Arabic {3adu:w} = "enemy" (3 = ayin), Greek awe:mi = "I, being a wind, blow" < IE H2-w-H1, c.f. Arabic {2awa:!} = "air" (! = glottal stop). Some have postulated two H1 laryngeals :: well, if so, one was the glottal stop and the other was the ordinary "h" sound. When was the word "laryngeal" first given to these sounds? The name seems to show an idea by someone that these sounds were pronounced in that sort of area of the mouth and throat. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 6 18:13:08 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:13:08 -0500 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Can you elaborate on Germanic-Uralic contacts? Are you only talking about Scandinavian or all Germanic? [snip] >The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of >contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as >for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as >you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. > - Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 6 18:32:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 14:32:23 EDT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Lithuania?) Message-ID: Of course, one basic problem is that the means by which languages "split" is not uniform. Eg., gradual differentiation within a large but contiguous dialect continuum will have rather different results from an abrupt divorce due to rapid, long-distance migration which "leapfrogs" over intervening languages. Magyar, for instance, isolated on all sides by IE languages. Or imagine that Vandal -- the result of a migration from Poland to Tunisia, spanning about one human lifetime -- had survived into the present, isolated from all other Germanic languages. Or a relict like Crimean Gothic would be in the same position, albeit for different reasons. I suspect Tocharian was a case somewhat like this. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 6 18:40:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 14:40:05 EDT Subject: Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse" Message-ID: >g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: >But aren't there extraneous ideological interpretations on the other side as >well? The archaeological buzzword is "process archaeology", which seems to >claim that, in general, populations may go through major changes in pottery, >burial customs, agriculture and housing without any major change in their >ethnic identity (including language). -- exactly. It's a wholly unwarranted assumption; and it severely contradicts what we'd argue by analogy from the historical record. Pure ideological imposition. >Insofar as Gimbutas's idealization of Old Europe is concerned, I am >skeptical. -- me too. In fact, what really strikes me as "stretching" in Gimbutas is the extreme over-elaboration of the hypothesis, attempting a precision (with the various 'waves' and whatnot) that, at this distance in time, just isn't possible. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 03:24:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:24:57 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: In what follows, I believe that "/g/" represents an 8-bit character (c-cedilla) that was mangled by the mail system. Please, remember that this system is very old, and does not handle 8-bit mail at all. --rma ] Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:38 PM [PG] > My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it > certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be > recognised. [PR] I believe you may be exaggerating a little here. In my travels around the country, I have heard a number of pronunciations including /hjuw/; in fact. the only time I can remember /g/, the palatal dorsal spirant, is here in the South: /g|/. [PG] > The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people > (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. [PR] Yes, I would have to say that /g/ (c-cedilla) is an allophone of /h/ in this instance though, of course, we might want to consider it a devoiced /j/. [PG] > Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we also > actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure into which > potential phonemes fit. [PR] I agree that qualification is sensible. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 14 04:49:51 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:49:51 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Larry Trask] This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. But it is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme. [Robert Whiting] I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [Pat Ryan] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. [Me] This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs out with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal pair. Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the voicing). But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, sooth/soothe, etc. However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic and the historical changes that have further obscured them in Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] 'uncle' /ata/, etc. On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, 2Panamint is a good counterexample. In languages where typical roots are monosyllabic (like English), one may find many minimal pairs, but even in English, where there are 7392 possible one syllable words of the structure (C)V(C), there are only 1729 of these that actually occur in my dialect of English. For example, the largest "minimal set" consists of the frame [_ir]. I have 'peer, tier, beer, deer, gear, cheer, jeer, fear, sear, sheer, hear, veer, mere, near, leer, rear, we're, year'. Notice that [kir], [thir], [dhir], [zir], [zhir], [ngir], and [hwir] do not exist. There are also no words in my dialect that start with a [g] and end in a voiceless alveopalatal affricate. In Panamint, the typical root structure is CV(X)CV (X is a gemination marker, an /h/, or a nasal). The bisyllabic structure of the typical root means that minimal pairs are far less likely than they are in English. For example, there is a minimal pair tykka (y is barred i) 'eat'/nykka 'dance'/-pykka 'suffer' (this one, however, never occurs without a noun incorporated). That's the largest one I've ever been able to find (and -pykka is an iffy inclusion since it never occurs in isolation). There's no kykka, kwykka, ?ykka, sykka, hykka, tsykka, mykka, ngykka, ngwykka, jykka, or wykka. With all the possibilities of root structure in Panamint, there just aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic inventory has had to be determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using permissible initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. [Robert Whiting] The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). [Me] I disagree with Robert on this one. The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the language). All phonemes do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence equally impressive. Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and unpredictability factors all point toward them being separate phonemes. While the evidence for separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as overwhelming as the evidence separating /s/ and /z/, it is still enough to compel a separation on synchronic grounds. [Pat Ryan] What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [Me] Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This is not appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the phonological or morphophonological rules are still productive. [Robert Whiting] Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' [Me] The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun into a verb by voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, e.g., 'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. Even the intervocalic voicing of /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., path [th] and paths [dh], but path's [th]. These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for these pairs. Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it in a theoretical sense. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 14 06:38:00 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 09:38:00 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. >I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >days without anyone questioning the original statement about >complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >Arthur, etc etc. And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a language you should deal with words that are native to that language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't mentioned any of them. Basically, anything that comes from Greek theta is going to be pronounced [th] in English. Apparent exceptions like Thomas or thyme can be accounted for by tracing the path of the word into English. But even these apparent exceptions only show that [th] opposes [t], not that [th] opposes [dh]. Now if you can make a similar list of words from Greek or Latin/French where original theta is pronounced [dh] (I expect that 'rhythm' and 'logarithm' and the similar but unrelated 'algorithm' [but not 'arithmetic'] are special cases because of the -thm#) or you can show a list of words of Germanic origin where intervocalic is pronounced [th] then you would have a good point and something to look at. If not, not. Now "foreign word" is a perceptual category (just as "phoneme" is) and it is how the speaker perceives the word that decides what phonological (and sometimes morphological) rules he can expect to apply. Moreover, the perception of whether a word is foreign or not is likely to change over time (the longer a word is in the language the more likely it is to eventually be regarded as non-foreign). And once a word is considered native, then it will treated phonologically as a native word. So perhaps you are saying that [th] and [dh] are separate phonemes and intervocalic [th] is used to mark foreign words since all native words will have [dh] intervocalically. This does not sound particularly convincing to me. Let's look at what happens with words borrowed from languages that do have /dh/. Since [dh] allegedly has phonemic status in English, one would expect that they would be borrowed as [dh] just as Greek theta is borrowed as [th] (cf. borrowings with /f/ and /v/ below). But if one looks at Arabic 'dhow', although the spelling preserves the Arabic /dh/, the pronunciation is with [d], not [dh]. And so on. I know of no example where a word with /dh/ in the original has been borrowed as [dh] into English despite the frequent preservation of in the spelling, but if there are some then I would consider them as tending to indicate phonemic status for [dh] in English. But I wouldn't be convinced without minimal pairs like 'focal' - 'vocal' or 'file' - 'vile' >[dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. noun (adj.) verb life live half halve house [haws] house [hawz] glass glaze grass graze breath breathe bath bathe cloth clothe wreath writhe (wreathe) teeth (tooth) teethe loath (loth) loathe [An apparent exception is 'tithe' [noun and verb] but this is rather a fossilized form than an exception. The word originally meant "tenth" and indeed was identical with the contemporary word for "tenth" ('te:odha') with the proper intervocalic voiced [dh]. With the marginalization of the word as a special kind of "tenth", it dropped out of its word class (ordinal numbers) and did not undergo the same changes as the rest of the group, which resulted in the levelling of the category to a final [th]. Thus the pronunciation with final voiced [dh] was preserved in both noun and verb [and is also reflected in the spelling.] [Another form that falls outside the system is 'smooth' (adj.) and 'smoothe' (v.). Here, again, there is no contrast between [th] and [dh]; [dh] simply appears in an unexpected place. And while 'smooth' is ancient in English, its origin is unknown. Contrast this with 'sooth' (n.) and 'soothe' (v.).] Morphohonemic variants are generally not considered distinct phonemes in that environment. At most they are considered morphophonemes and at the least simple allophones because the distribution of sounds is goverened by rule (in this case a morphological-phonological rule) and hence the value of the sound is predictable from its environment. Morphophonemic alternation is not sufficient to establish phonemic status (although it is often a prelude to it). Morphophonemic variants may very well be phonemically distinct in other environments, but it is the basic precept of internal reconstruction that morphophonemic variants can normally be traced back to some archephoneme in the pre-language. This is one reason why unrelated words is usually a requirement for minimal pairs. >That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that >of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly >controversial view Phonemic status is easy to show for /s/ and /z/, somewhat more difficult for /f/ and /v/ (but it exists), and very difficult for [th] and [dh]. If you look at a list of English words that begin with [v] you will find very few native words ('vat' and 'vixen' are about it). But both of these are dialect borrowings in standard English replacing earlier 'fat' (vessel) and 'fyxen' (feminine of 'fox' with '-en' feminine marker and umlaut). However, modern 'fat' ("fat", cf. G. 'Fett') and 'vat' ("large vessel", cf. G. 'Fass' [scharfes s]) are clearly a minimal pair since neither is likely to be recognized as a foreign word. On the other hand, 'focal' and 'vocal' are both recognized as foreign words, but the distinction /f/-/v/ is sufficient to differentiate them. Speakers now have to recognize inherent [v] sounds in words to distinguish them from both inherent [f] sounds and from [v] as a morphophonemic variant of /f/. Therefore /f/ and /v/ are separate phonemes (almost a borrowed phonemic distinction, but made possible by the mophophonemic alternation of [f] and [v]). As for 'of' and 'off', this is a stress difference. 'Off' is simply a lexicalized stressed form of 'of' (this is why 'off of' as in "get off of the grass" is considered substandard). >("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to >hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the >Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken >as a simple fact. I dare say that most descriptions of modern English do take this as a simple fact (just as many dictionaries will tell you that pronominal determiners are pronouns) and therefore not worth investigating. But facts are not data. Data exists in nature. Facts are observations about data. Facts are a matter of interpretation and facts can be wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to go beyond surface appearances to see if the facts are correct interpretations of the data. What I want to know is what are the data on which this "simple fact" of the phonemic status of [th] and [dh] in English is based. In this case, it would seem that [th, dh] just ride along on the coattails of [s, z] and [f, v] in the belief that if [s, z] and [f, v] split then [th, dh] must have too. The creation of the allophones of original /s/, /f/, and /th/ happened for all at the same time: unvoiced spirants between voiced sounds following a stressed vowel became voiced. This did not increase the number of contrasts (phonemes), merely the number of allophones (/s/ [s, z]; /f/ [f, v]; /th/ [th, dh]). The phonemic splits came later and for different reasons. First came morphophonemic alternation followed by, for /s/ and /z/, the use of /z/ to create expressive and imitative words; for /f/ and /v/, the need to differentiate borrowed words with inherent [f] and [v]; and, for [th] and [dh] -- well, I just can't think of anything that compels the use of [th] and [dh] for making distinctions. If you can provide something, I'd be glad to listen to it. But it will have to be better than loanwords that don't contrast with anything else and morphophonemic alternations or parallelism with [s, z] and [f, v]. But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two sounds? Now English does not have the world's greatest fit between writing and sounds. The same sounds can be written with different characters and the same characters can be used to write different sounds. In some cases, there is no way to tell how certain written combinations are to be spoken. There is no rule to tell you how a word like 'cough' is to be pronounced. One simply has to learn the pronunciation with the word. But with [th] and [dh] this is not necessary, even though there is no clue in the writing (with the exception of <-e> in verbs which marks the fact that the preceding is voiced). Otherwise one would have to learn the pronunciation of every word containing separately. When dealing with phonemes, if you know the pronunciation, you can distinguish a word from all other words with similar sounds except for the different phonemes. Phonemes distinguish between words when there is no other criterion for distinguishing them and are completely arbitrary. Thus there is no rule (phonological, morphological, or syntactical) for distinguishing between /fat/ and /bat/ except the rule that says that /f/ and /b/ are different phonemes. The phonemes /f/ and /b/ don't tell you anthing about these words except that they are different. If /f/ were always used only in verbs and /b/ were always used only in nouns, then one would have to take another look at the phonemic status of /f/ and /b/. When dealing with [th] and [dh] if you recogize the word category, you will know what the sound is. You don't have to learn the pronunciation with the word except in a very few cases (like 'rhythm'). Otherwise, even for words that you may not be familiar with like 'thole' or 'wether' or 'heterochthonous' you will know whether [th] or [dh] is correct. Words such as 'blithe' which can be pronounced with either [th] or [dh] (not as a matter of stress, but simply free variation) do not speak strongly in favor of phonemic status for these two sounds (athough it doesn't necessarily speak against it either). So once again, the only native words where [th] and [dh] contrast is 'thigh' and 'thy'. 'Thy' belongs to a class of words that always has [dh] in this position. 'Thigh' belongs to a class of words (not really a significant class, merely the complement of the other class) that always has [th] in this position. The apparent opposition between [th] and [dh] in this example is just a historical accident (in much the same way that homynyms come into existence through historical accidents) since the original distinction between these words did not depend on this opposition. Thus this "minimal pair" is not adequate to establish [th] and [dh] as separate phonemes in my opinion since distribution of sounds by rule is a more important criterion even if the rules are not phonological. And again, if you have evidence for the phonemic status of [th] and [dh] in English (and I don't mean evidence that they are recognized as different sounds [phones] or that they are morphophonemic variants), I will be happy to evaluate it. I just haven't found any that I consider convincing despite the fact that most grammars will list them as separate phonemes and put forth such "minimal pairs" as 'thigh' - 'thy' or 'ether' - 'either' or 'wreath' - 'wreathe' as evidence. Now there is no reason why [th] and [dh] can't be separate phonemes in English. They might very well be. Or they might well be on their way to becoming separate phonemes. But if they are, one can reasonably expect there to be some evidence of it. If [th] and [dh] are different phonemes in English, then it is an unused phonemic distinction. And since it is unused, it can't be proved that they aren't phonemically distinct just because there is no evidenc that they are. What can be shown is that [th, dh] are allophones of /th/ that resulted from the original voicing of spirants in a voiced environment and that these allophones can be used as morphophonemic variants. But without unequivocal evidence that they are used as separate phonemes, it is safer to assume that they are not. In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find [dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that [th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 14 13:17:11 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 14:17:11 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as > a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. Speakers who retain the 'where'/'wear' contrast have different intuitions about the voiceless sound. Some -- apparently including Pete -- feel strongly that voiceless [w] is a single segment, and hence a phoneme in its own right. Others -- certainly including me -- feel equally strongly that voiceless [w] represents the cluster /hw/. As far as I'm concerned, 'whine' is phonemically /hwain/, while 'wine' is phonemically /wain/. I have had this intuition since childhood, and I still have it now, even though I recognize that I typically pronounce this /hw/ as a single phonetic segment. > My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it > certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be > recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people > (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. This time it is not only intuitions, but pronunciations, which differ. In my western NY State accent, I can't possibly pronounce 'hue' with the ich-Laut. That's because, for me, the phonemic structure is not /hju:/, but rather /hIw/, where 'I' stands for small capital . For me, 'hue' and similar words do not rhyme with 'you', which is definitely /ju:/. Likewise, 'fuse' (/fIwz/) does not rhyme with the verb 'use' (/ju:z/), and so on. If I drawl these words, 'hue' and 'fuse' get a lengthened [I], while 'you' and 'use' get a lengthened [u]. I think this is typical of everybody in my area. One of my brothers is named 'Hugh', and absolutely nobody back home calls him anything but [hIw]. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:15:13 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:15:13 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 09:54 PM 4/4/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >[PR] >I would have to say that you are wrong. >There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a >component of a minimal pair. Examples have been given that show otherwise. >[PR] >I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a rule. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:24:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:24:59 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000d01bfa0b7$0cfe1260$237101d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 08:38 PM 4/6/00 +0100, petegray wrote: >Pat said: >> I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. >> In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. >Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as >a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. Well, in my dialect they are identical, so the issue doesn't come up. But where they are distinct, I would indeed treat them as allophones. For one thing, English does not have rising diphthongs starting in 'w', so an analysis similar to the "hew" case is unavailable. >My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it >certainly no longer does. That is not what was claimed. Allophonic status does not really require that sort of situation. > Such a pronunciation would not even be >recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. Of course it does. The ich-laut is an allophone, that means it is governed by a rule. > But still, some people >(such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. I base this on several factors: - The sound ONLY occurs before a former long-u, even in Modern English. - The normal reflex of old [u:] in Modern English is [yu:]. - It is almost impossible to pronounce [h] before a [y]. Thus, it is easily treated as a synchronic rule of English pronunciation. That makes the sound an allophone of [h] in that environment - before a [y]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 14 16:12:06 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 19:12:06 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: On Tue, 4 Apr, proto-language wrote: >[RW] >I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >[PR] [ moderator snip ] >There is no phoneme in any language which has not been >established as a component of a minimal pair. So what? Do you assume therefore that anything that is a component of a minimal pair is a phoneme? I know that you have said that using logic is childish, but you really ought to try it sometime. Saying that anything that occurs in a minimal pair is a phoneme because all phonemes occur in minimal pairs is like saying that anything that is black is a raven because all ravens are black. I know you won't understand what I'm talking about, but any textbook on logic will tell you that for any universal statement (all S are P) the simple converse (all P are S) is not valid. The minimum valid conversion of "all S are P" is "some P are S". [RW] >>The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English >>minimal pair >> 'thigh' / 'thy' >> (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] >> is clearly marginal) >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). >That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic >status for both. Yes, of course you would. I wouldn't expect you to do anything else. >>This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >>distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments >[PR] >What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? An environment that is voiced. >What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? This is a morphophonemic alternation. You can make as long a list as you want of such alternations and wherever there is a distinction between [th] and [dh], [th] will occur in a substantive and [dh] will appear in a verb that is derived from it. Very rarely, [dh] will appear also in the substantive, but it will always appear in the verb. [RW] >>and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. >[PR] >I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological >conditioning factors. And here you would have the full support of Stanley Friesen. But rules are rules, whether they are phonological, morphological, or lexical. It is just a question of how much one area of language can affect another. [RW] >>Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two >>sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a >>single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds >>can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate >>phonemes.' >[PR] >I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. Which is your strongest argument. Which is why you should be supporting my argument instead of claiming that distribution by rule is less important than minimal pairs in determining phonemicity. You don't seem to realize that, while what I have said does not directly support your position, it does give you a stronger position to argue from. I know that thinking things through is not your forte, but you really should learn to think in terms of how the various parts of a problem relate to each other. You say that the distribution of *e and *o is governed by rule and that only a minimal pair would prove their phonemic status. And I say that even a minimal pair wouldn't necessarily demonstrate their phonemicity so long as they can still be predicted by rule and then you say no, all phonemes occur in minimal pairs so anything that occurs in a minimal pair must be a phoneme. And you claim that this is a rational line of thought? But if you claim that [th] and [dh] must be phonemes because they occur as morphophonemic variants as you did above (bath, bathe), then you have lost your argument about *e and *o because they are also morphophonemic variants. Indeed, it was in part their morphophonemic alternation that led, through internal reconstruction, to the laryngeal theory. So if morphophonemic alternation (conditioned variance) demonstrates phonemicity, then *e and *o are separate phonemes. Which position do you want to support? >[RW] >>Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but >>contrastive environments are a clincher. >[PR] >I find this totally unacceptable. Yes, I can see why it would confuse you. The second part of the statement is not entirely clear. So I will try to explain it in more detail and write very slowly and distinctly. Minimal pairs is a heuristic. A heuristic is a way of finding things that might prove significant. Minimal pairs is a useful way of looking for phonemes. Now if a heuristic works regularly, people tend to start thinking of it as a law. Minimal pairs is so successful at predicting phonemes that often no further investigation is done and a minimal pair is considered a sufficient condition for phonemicity. This is the position taken by you and Stanley Friesen (and probably a lot of other people). But a lot of people also realize that minimal pairs is not a necessary condition for establishing phonemicity (I realize that you probably don't understand this stuff about "necessary" and "sufficient" conditions because it has to do with logic, but bear with me) and this is where you and Stanley part company. Now I believe that minimal pairs is not even a sufficient condition for establishing phonemicity, particularly when the number of minimal pairs is minimal. I believe that distribution of sounds by rule is more important than what may appear to be minimal pairs in determining whether two sounds are distinct phonemes or not. I also believe that the rule that determines the distribution of the sounds does not have to be phonological. This is where you and Stanley join up again, in the belief that the conditioning environment must be phonetic. What I meant by "contrastive environments" is, as I said, not entirely clear from the statement (but I'm not entirely sure that saying "non-contrasting" would have been better). What I had in mind is that the different phonemes provide the only contrast, and this contrast must be completely arbitrary for the two sounds to be separate phonemes. That is to say that the phonemes themselves can tell you nothing about the words involved except that they are different. If a sound regularly occurs only in a certain class of words and a similar but different sound regularly occurs elsewhere, then this is complementary distribution. And complementary distribution of similar sounds points to no phonemic distinction between them. If you can always predict which sound will be present from the environment, then the sounds are not different phonemes (in that environment). Phonemes should tell you nothing about words except that they are different (i.e., they shouldn't tell you that one word is a noun and the other is a verb or that one word is a pronoun and the other is not, or that one is singular and the other plural, etc.). >Show me contrastive phonological environments. Sorry, "phonological" wasn't mentioned in my statement, so you will have to provide your own. >[RW] >>As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, >>similar items that are in complementary distribution are usually >>aspects of the same thing. But believe it or not, linguists will >>still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds and different >>analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes claimed for >>a particular language. >[PR] >Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. Well, so long as you disagree with everything I say, even if you have to destroy your own arguments to do it, just because I have said it, this is doubtless true. But I wouldn't call it fate, I'd call it a conditioned reflex. I myself would have phrased it differently, and would have said that I will agree with you when you are right, but perhaps this is actually exactly the same thing that you have said. >I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional >linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. I will let you answer this one yourself because: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >Whether any given linguist did or did not accept the validity of >my studies is not a proof or disproof of my work. Now here is something that I can agree with you on. Who agrees or disagrees with a theory is not proof pro or con. Who makes a statement does not affect its validity. Who proposes or accepts the theory is immaterial. It matters not whether the proponent of a theory is well or poorly educated, is a "professional linguist" (PL) or a known crackpot (not necessarily different things), has been convicted of income tax evasion, or wets the bed. All that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. A theory is not automatically wrong because it is proposed by Patrick Ryan, and it is not automatically correct because it is proposed by a PL. So whether a PL agrees with your ideas or not is irrelevant, as you yourself pointed out on 27 May 1999. Obviously PL's are not automatically correct in your mind or you wouldn't be telling PL's that they are wrong on a daily basis. If PL's are always right, then citing a PL is a good argument, but if they are only right when they agree with you and wrong otherwise, it rather vitiates your appeal to the authority of an unnamed "professional linguist". This doesn't mean that you are wrong though; it just means that it isn't a valid argument. And all that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 15 09:05:16 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2000 12:05:16 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000d01bfa0b7$0cfe1260$237101d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, petegray wrote: > Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we > also actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure > into which potential phonemes fit. For a while I was beginning to think that I was the only one who believed this. Analysis does not stop with a minimal pair. Minimal pairs is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for establishing phonemicity. Minimal pairs is just a useful heuristic for locating probable phonemes. But it is useful because it is usually accurate. A minimal pair that does not indicate phonemicity has to have a good explanation. And there are doubtless cases where minimal pairs still exist in parts of the language even though phonemicity of the sounds is being lost through phonemic merger. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 03:36:18 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:36:18 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 4:55 AM [SG] The issue at issue is the number and nature of vowel phonemes present in the ("Balochi"; in English, Baluchi) language. It is identical to that of Sanskrit: a, i, i, a:, i:, u:, e, o (the latter two inherently long). As far as I remember you categorically denied the possibility that such a system could exist. Now, it does, which removes every further claim you are building or trying to build on this unsubstantiated claim. [PR] There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, is it not? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 14 08:46:08 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:46:08 GMT Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Perhaps PIE /e/ and /o/ were once allophones, but afterwards analogical effects messed it up. If it was /o/ only after the stress, so explaining e.g. the /o/ in verb perfects such as {leloiqw-} = "(he) has left" , the /o/ in {woid-} might be the result of analogy. Likewise with English /th/ versus /dh/: the pronunciation /dh/ spread from unstressed pronouns to the same pronouns pronounced stressed in emphasis. And I have noticed another minimal pair of English /th/ versus /dh/: {thou} /dhau/ = "you" (sg.) :: {thou} /thau/ = engineering slang for "a thousandth of an inch". From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:34:56 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:34:56 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <005e01bfa29e$d40b3520$64c71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:42 PM 4/9/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Jens and IEists: >[PR] >To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >support with some reservations: >"After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >/e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the >chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >formerly received a secondary pitch accent." Yes, this is one suggested explanation, one I find less than convincing, as I find few, if any, well-attested examples of this sort of sound change. However, even *assuming* it is the correct model, it still leaves the e/o distinction phonemic in PIE! Lehmann here is discussing the *loss* of a conditioning factor as the basis for the sound change. That is the very definition of a phonemic split, similar to the s/z and th/dh splits in English. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Apr 18 03:59:16 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 21:59:16 -0600 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Someonw wrote: >>> Hyeug - to yoke. >> I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. Peter replied: >I have been hunting through my notes, and I'm not sure now either! >I picked it up from somewhere, without keeping a record of who suggested it. >I only have a note that Sanskrit occasionally has a long augment before this >root a:yunak, and a reference to the Greek development in /dzugon/, which >one or two people have suggested shows an initial Hy cluster (#Hy > /dz/, >#y > /h/). And my Sanskrit books show no sign of a long augment! For what it's worth, several scholars of the dim dark past have proposed that PIE y- yielded Greek ([z] or [dz]?), while Hy- yielded [h-] (rough breathing), provided that the laryngeal was voiceless. For discussion and analysis see Lehman, PIEP, 74ff. I think this development is phonetically more plausible: the voiced resonant remains voiced, the voiceless laryngeal devoices the y-. But please: the evidence is fairly scanty, and I cannot say that I accept this as fact. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 12:49:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 07:49:51 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:54 PM > Perhaps we really need to distinguish between those "lumpers" who only > publish working papers with possibly suggestive and unsifted data (Greenberg, > et al.) and those who publish finished proofs with well-analyzed and > evaluated data. [PR] I think this characterizes the situation perfectly, Nonetheless, I think into which camp Greenberg should be placed may be affected by a reading of his recent _Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives_, which I find a significant advance over what he has written before. In it, he compares morphology among many reputedly related language-families in a, IMHO, thoroughly believable way. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Apr 16 01:59:45 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2000 21:59:45 -0400 Subject: "lumpers" - in defence of Ruhlen Message-ID: There is actually a work by Ruhlen dating from the 70's, which, while open to substantal criticism, is absoutely unexceptionable from the scholarly point of view: Ruhlen, Merrit. 1978. "Nasal Vowels". Joseph Greenberg, ed. Universals of Human Language. 2. Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 203-41. Robert Orr >While I have not had the pleasure of meeting the others named by Mr. Holm, I >studied Anatolian linguistics with Prof. Shevoroshkin for an entire semester. >Although I was not interested in the (Illic^-Svityc^) Nostratic etymologies >proposed for various difficult Lycian, Lydian, or Carian items, my overall >impression of him was positive: He clearly is an excellent linguist with a >strong grasp of the methodologies of historical linguistics. >I would not even rule out a work associated with Mr. Ruhlen without at least a >cursory examination. I daresay most list members are as tolerant as I... > Rich Alderson From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Apr 14 13:20:11 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:20:11 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Lehmann, in his Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, p. 107, attributes the term to a Semiticist, Hermann Moeller, in 1879. He mentions only a note and does not give a citation. Herb Stahlke >>> mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk 04/11/00 10:56AM >>> When was the word "laryngeal" first given to these sounds? The name seems to show an idea by someone that these sounds were pronounced in that sort of area of the mouth and throat. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Apr 17 09:16:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 12:16:42 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote] > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. [...] [Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen] > I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves, and make very good > sense typologically as well. [...] > The set [h], [x], [{ghw}] is very close to Dutch which has [h], [x] and > [{gh}], while in many languages gamma is rounded, cf., e.g., the > development underlying the orthography of English law, corresponding to > Danish lov (Swedish lag). I have therefore bee preaching this set for > quite many years (on record since 1982, I see), often against heavy > criticism. I now see the very same set advocated, without explicit > reasons, in Meier-Bru"gger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Has the > gospel been heard? At any rate, the agreement is nice to see. As regards Uralic, your *H2 = [x] and *H3 = *[Yw] (I suppose you mean a voiced fricative with {gh}) seem to work well. PIE *H3 = [Yw] > PU *x = [Y] makes sense. There is no known example of *H3 > PU retroflex *S, and if the sound value [Yw] is correctly reconstructed, it is predictable that there aren't any - a substitution [Yw] > [S] is certainly not possible. But there's a problem with *H1 as [h] from an Uralic point of view. There are quite a few loan words with *H1 > PU *S. A substitution [x] > retroflex [S] is phonetically sensible, given that the system in the receiving language doesn't have an unvoiced velar fricative or [h] - parallels are known. But [h] > [S] seems impossible in any circumstance. One would rather expect [h] > [k] or even [h] > zero. But then again, I guess it is not necessarily the case that the sound values of the laryngeals remained the same in all the daughter languages before they disappeared. The cases with IE *H1 > U *S seem to be Pre-Baltic and Pre-Germanic. I have also entertained the thought that there may be one loan word which points to a palatal(ized) value of *H1. PU *s´ijili 'hedgehog' might derive from PIE *H1eg´hi-l- (> German Igel). But this etymology must be considered uncertain since no parallel cases for PIE *H1 > PU *s´ have been found. __________ Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Apr 14 14:16:41 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 17:16:41 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] >The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of >contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as >for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as >you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. [Rick Mc Callister:] >Can you elaborate on Germanic-Uralic contacts? >Are you only talking about Scandinavian or all Germanic? Proto-Germanic and Pre-Germanic. Both Finnish and Saami have Germanic loan words borrowed before e.g. PGerm. *ee > NWGerm. *aa. There are also Germ. loan words predating e.g. the Proto-Finnic changes *ti > *si and *c´c´ > *ts, which took place very early, probably 3000+ years BP (see below). Saami and Finnish also have shared PG loan words, which must thus be at least about 3000 years old, e.g. Finn. kärsi- 'suffer', Saami gierda- 'sustain' < *kärti- < PG *xardhia- 'harden' Finn. kats-o- 'look', kaitse- 'look after', Saami geahc^c^a- 'look' < *kac´c´i- < PG *gaatja- 'look after etc.' As for Pre-Germanic, there are loan words which point to retained laryngals and the derivative in question appears only in Germanic, e.g. Finn. rehto 'row' < *reSto < Pre-G *rH1-tó- (> PG *radha-) Finn. lehti, Saami lasta 'leaf' < *leSti < Pre-G *blH1-tó- (> PG *bladha-) Finn. rohto 'herb' < *roSto < Pre-G *ghróH-to- (> PG *grootha-) For more on the subject, I recommend Jorma Koivulehto's book "Verba Mutuata" (Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne #237), which contains 16 articles (some 450 pages in total) by him, dealing with IE-U contacts and focusing mostly on Finnic and Germanic. __________ Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Apr 14 14:46:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 17:46:40 +0300 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [The original suggestion was that Tocharian *wesa 'gold' (A wäs, B yasa) was borrowed from Proto-Samoyedic *wesä 'metal, iron'.] [I wrote:] >So, Samoyed *wesä ~ Tocharian *wesa seems like chance correspondence. But, >assuming that the Toch. form requires an irregular (?) metathesis, the loan >etymology perhaps remains as a(n unlikely) possibility? >> [Joat Simeon] > -- I suppose it could have been a Tocharian-Samoyed loan? This would be very unlikely, since then it would have to be of another origin than its widely attested cognates elsewhere in Uralic (Finnish vaski etc.). It was recently pointed out to me in private correspondence that the development IE *H2eus- > Tocharian *wesa required by the suggested IE etymology would be quite exceptional. And I was not aware that the same loan etymology had already been suggested by Fredrik Kortlandt (in "Eight Indo-Uralic verbs?", Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 50). He takes the view that the IE etymology of Toch. *wesa is phonetically impossible and the word must be a Samoyed loan. In this light, I am inclined to think that this is indeed the case and *wesa is not etymologically linked with Latin aurum etc. Regards, Ante Aikio From promotion at benjamins.com Sat Apr 22 17:04:23 2000 From: promotion at benjamins.com (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 13:04:23 -0400 Subject: New Books: Indo-European: Smith, Sihler Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing announces the availability of the following new works: Historical Linguistics 1995. Volume 1: General issues and non-Germanic Languages. Selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Manchester, August 1995. John Charles SMITH and Delia BENTLEY (eds.) 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Contents: Introduction; Changes in Pronunciation; Sound Laws; Analogy; Semantic Change; Reconstruction; External Aspects of Language; The Interpretation of Written Records; Appendix: Phonetics - the mechanisms of speech and the classifications of speech sounds; Glossary; Glossary of Terms in German; Bibliography; Index. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6762325 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 21 17:06:54 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 18:06:54 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Jens said: >I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves ... A voiced value of >/H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; Steady on! This word is far from clear, and is, I believe, the only evidence for voicing in H3. Can we really construct our theories on one isolated unclear word? Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 22 16:00:15 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 18:00:15 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: [...] > But > there's a problem with *H1 as [h] from an Uralic point of view. There > are quite a few loan words with *H1 > PU *S. A substitution [x] > > retroflex [S] is phonetically sensible, given that the system in the > receiving language doesn't have an unvoiced velar fricative or [h] - > parallels are known. But [h] > [S] seems impossible in any circumstance. > One would rather expect [h] > [k] or even [h] > zero. > But then again, I guess it is not necessarily the case that the sound > values of the laryngeals remained the same in all the daughter languages > before they disappeared. The cases with IE *H1 > U *S seem to be > Pre-Baltic and Pre-Germanic. > I have also entertained the thought that there may be one loan word which > points to a palatal(ized) value of *H1. PU *s´ijili 'hedgehog' might > derive from PIE *H1eg´hi-l- (> German Igel). But this etymology must be > considered uncertain since no parallel cases for PIE *H1 > PU *s´ have > been found. While one should of course be cautious about sweeping statements straddling millennia, I have some worries with an Ich-Laut for *H1. First, could a palatal spirant really avoid triggering a vowel (by svarabhakti or otherwise) in the position after non-initial stops if both of the back spirants *H2 and *H3 do produce one? Second, would its vocalization product (by svarabhakti or direct vocalization) really by a centralized vowel? Third, the reflexes of H1 and H2 do not follow anything remotely reminiscent of the satem/centum isogloss. Fourth, if people are crying for an /h/ because there are aspirates, isn't this our chance to given them one? Even so, I cannot dismiss your suggestion of phonetic variation - that could even have been there from the start, meaning that [h] may be just one of the manifestations of /H1/, which would still leave room for [x^] being another. I do not believe phonetic typology has reached a point enabling it to exclude any such thing. And incidentally, the Greek reflexes of CRH1C with /-Re:-/ are easier to udnerstand from [x^] than from [h], since the latter would simply add voicelessness, but not redirect the articulation to any other location than where the sonants are themselves - and they all produce [a] when given an undisturbed course. But also FU should be kept open for interpretation in terms of variation. I have always tended to see the substitution of sh-sounds for h and the Finnish development of sh to h in the light of the Swedish pronunciation of sj which varies a huge lot and certainly includes sounds that would qualify excellently as substitutes for [h] if the language did not have that already. Is it possible that the development of sh to h had begun, on a limited scale, in Proto-FU already, so that a foreign [h] could be perceived as a (substandard) manifestation of an sh-like sound? That would be a story much like the Russian g for h. For what it's worth, I think the equation of siili and Igel is brilliant. Regards, Jens From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Apr 21 09:38:31 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:38:31 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <010901bfa5c2$98ebec60$2ac71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >[PR] >There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no >language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ >is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. >This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious >that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, >is it not? In diachronic terms, you are right, with the tiny (and picky) amendment that the Balochi vowels are not derived from an "early Sanskrit" source, since Balochi happens to be an Iranian language rather than an Indic one. -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 22:07:07 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 17:07:07 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 10:34 AM > At 10:42 PM 4/9/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >> Dear Jens and IEists: >> [PRp] >> To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >> change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >> phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >> support with some reservations: >> "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >> /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when >> the chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >> formerly received a secondary pitch accent." [SF] > Yes, this is one suggested explanation, one I find less than convincing, > as I find few, if any, well-attested examples of this sort of sound change. > However, even *assuming* it is the correct model, it still leaves the e/o > distinction phonemic in PIE! Lehmann here is discussing the *loss* of a > conditioning factor as the basis for the sound change. That is the very > definition of a phonemic split, similar to the s/z and th/dh splits in > English. [PR] Essentially, I agree with you. Rightly or wrongly, however, I favor basically Trask's definition with qualifications: "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning"; the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but that 'ether/either' does. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 22 14:59:07 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:59:07 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <005e01bfa29e$d40b3520$64c71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: Dear Pat and anyone, I am truly grateful for the very explicitly critical reply to my mail, for it gives me occasion to comment on some points that appear to have become common heritage in the field of IE, even though the basis for them appears slender or non-existing. I have a problem, however, with dragging named authorities into this; do we have a right to bother third party just because _we_ cannot come to an agreement? Still, the literature is there, and for this very purpose. So, if our moderator permits, I'll react to your posting in full. On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, proto-language wrote: > Dear Jens and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" > Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:54 PM >>>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: > > [PR] > To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported > change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged > phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I > support with some reservations: > "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ > /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the > chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented > formerly received a secondary pitch accent." That is not what we find. It may be a popular guess about the unknowable, but, as far as observations _can_ be made, they are very potently against it. This is not ad hoc, it's rather contra hoc. I could understand that a de-accented /e/ turned into /o/ if all unaccented /e/'s became /o/ (as I think they did at one point), but the next step for all would be to go on to zero (as I believe they in fact did). Surely, this cannot explain IE "o-grade", except for the plain cases where lengthening has occurred, so that we get, e.g., *-e':n vs. *'-o:n from accented *-e'n-s and unaccented *'-en-s respectively. The rule is completely inadequate to account for an alternation between accented o and zero (as in the perfect), nor does it tell us why the pretonic -o- of the causative has not been lost. > Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended > by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question > like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, > may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I > understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive > feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. Agreed, and now it's happening, in both directions. Too bad that suprasegmentals are not being conveyed on the list, but my "When will you ever learn?" was meant with a ring of sarcasm, potentially against myself - meaning "How long can I go on disagreeing with everybody?" As opinions stand, it seems to be the facts that ought to give in: I am still waiting for solid evidence favoring the most popular views about ablaut; when will the IE languages ever learn how they are supposed to be? > Lehmann's position is maintained more recently (1993) in his _Theoretical > Bases of Indo-European Linguistics_, where he writes on page 131: > "Deflected grade is explained by loss of primary accent on a vowel and > replacement by a secondary accent. If in derivation the accent fell on an > affix rather than on the root, the root vowel under such secondary accent > changed to o, as in Greek nomo's "pasture," nomeu's "shepherd" in contrast > with the vowel of the accented root in the verb ne'mo: "I pasture". If there are two types to'mos and tomo's, it cannot be the accent that caused any of the syllables to assume the vocalism /o/. If the cited rule were correct, there should be -o- and not zero grade in the to-participle, and an u-stem like *pe'r-tu-s (ON fjordr) should alternate with **por-te'w- and not with *pr.-te'w- (Eng. ford, Welsh rhyd, Avest. p at r@tu-; ambiguous only Lat. portus). I find the explanation by a "secondary accent" wholly circular; there is no other evidence for such a secondary accent than the o-vocalism it is supposed to explain. And zero-grade appears under the very same circumstances - so the -o- looks like something that has a reason _different_ from the changes that led to zero. > Though Jens may assert correctly that I personally am not as familiar with > the literature as he is, I sincerely doubt whether Jens would be justified > in asserting the same for Professor Lehmann. Hey, I never expressed an opinion about your familiarity with the literature, nor would I find it pertinent to the matter: Mine isn't perfect, and where I know it, it doesn't always help much. > [JR] >> I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the >> /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; > [PR] > Perfect > As Lehmann sees it, *o' is the result of a secondary tone-accent of a > stress- and tone-accent stage that was preceded by stress-accent stage. > During the combined stress- and tone-accent stage, a hypothetical perfect 1. > p. s. *we'id-eH(2) would have become, in the plural, 1. p. p. *wid-me', with > the full- and zero-grades being the result of the stress-accent while the > tone-accents (marked by ') shifted from the root-syllable to the affix. > As is well known, the perfect "often, but not always, had reduplication". > Therefore, the easiest explanation for the *o of the attested *wo'id-eH(2) > is to assume that it is the simplification of an originally reduplicated > form: *we'-woid-eH(2) with the reduplicating syllable receiving the primary > tone-accent and root-syllable receiving a secondary tone-accent, analogous > with *de'-dork-eH(2) [Greek de'dorka]. Greek verbal accent is non-original, all finite verb forms being accented as early as the laws of limitation permit. In languages reflecting a free accent in continuations of the perfect (Vedic, Germanic, Hittite) the -o- is accented. Note also that corrected *de-do'rk^-H2e cannot have its -o- explained from an earlier form with accent on the reduplication, for in such cases the language itself tells us that the rest of the verbal body is reduced to zero-grade, cf. Vedic 3pl prs. da'dhati from *dhe'-dhH1-n.ti. Theoretically, one could imagine that the -o- of the perfect was earlier unaccented, and only _got_ accented in a relatively late period, namely after the reduction of e to o, but before the further reduction to zero; in that case the intermediate stage o would be preserved. I believe that actually happened in a few cases, but the scenario become unnecessarily complicated with the perfect, and it divorces the explanation of the o/zero ablaut of the perfect from that of other reduplicated categories. > [JR] >> the same goes for the >> intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has >> o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). > [PR] > In Beekes, I see no *o-vocalism in intensive reduplication (*we'r-w(e)rt-, > 'to turn'; and I am not familiar with the IE reduplicated aorist (Beekes > lists only three types: stem, thematic, and sigmatic) --- could you give an > example? I don't know why Beekes writes "-(e)-" here; I wouldn't (Beekes also writes v instead of his usual w in this example, so maybe we should not overinterpret every fine point here). The expected *-o- is posited e.g. in the book on the subject by Christiane Schaefer, Das Intensivum im Vedischen, and in LIV. The assumption of *-o- is based on the lack of palatalization in Indo-Iranian (Ved. carkarmi, janghanti) and the existence of an apparent "primary present with o-grade" elsewhere which can hardly be anything but a dereduplicated continuation of this category, given the special semantic specification spelled out by Hiersche as "Bezeichnungen wiederholter und angestrengter physischer Taetigkeit" (IF 68, 1963, 157). As I claim to have shown myself, the Balto-Slavic examples treat root-final laryngeals in a way that reveals the one-time presence of reduplication in what is now Lith. ba'rti 'scold', ka'lti 'forge', ma'lti 'grind' and their Latvian and Slavic counterparts. I also believe I have shown the Hitt. verb asa:si, 3pl asesanzi 'colonize' to be an old intensive, levelled from *asa:si, *e:sanzi (by generalization of /as-/) from *H1s-H1o's-ti/*H1e's-H1s-n.ti (passed to the hi-conjugation because of the *-o-). This is precious in showing vowel gradation in the reduplication also, a structure reappearing in the Arm. nominal derivative karkut 'hail' from *gr.-gro'Hd- (via *karkrut) from the root of Slav. gradU 'hail', Lith. gru'odas. - The reduplicated aorist is mostly thematic and so has zero-grade, as in Ved. avocat, Gk. ei^pon (IE *we'-w{kw}-e/o-), but there are a number of athematic forms in Vedic, e.g. aji:gar 1. 'awoke', 2. 'devoured' from two different IE verbs, 1 *H1gi-H1go'r-t, 2 *{gw}i-{gw}o'rH3-t, again with lack of palatalization before the *-o-. > As for reduplicated presents, I cannot put my finger on an example without a > final root laryngeal, which complicates the pictures. But if you have an > example of root *Ce'C- and reduplicated present: *Ce'CoC-, the same > explanation as above for the perfect could be applied. I do not particularly advocate the reconstruction of -o- in the normal reduplicated present, but I know some that do, and I have very little to prove them wrong with. I rather believe the dissimilation in reduplications that changed *wert-wert- into *wert-wort- and further into either *we-wort- (pf.) or *wr.-wort- (intens.) was a spontaneous rather than a regular event of phonetic change. But the main point of the issue is that the -o- is here accented. > [JR] >> unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, > [PR] > We are, if Lehmann is correct, dealing with *two* phenomena: 1) changes > brought about by tone-accent shifts; and 2) changes brought about by > stress-accent shifts. My question will have to be: How can anyone know that? And how could old forms avoid being hit by later changes? That appears to me to be such a great obstacle to all theories I have seen that one will have to rank it as lethal. > Without specifying exactly which you have in mind, statements become > problematical to interpret. I avoid all such problems by not pronouncing a verdict about points for which there is no evidence, and especially of course if there _is_ evidence to the contrary. > [JR] >> cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. >> *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an >> optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like >> *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; >> ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is >> *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other >> examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. > [PR] > That is exactly what we should expect as a result of the shift of > stress-accent from *e. Didn't somebody say this should end up being /o/? > [JR] >> However, lengthened /e:/ does >> alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to >> *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem >> eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if >> the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not >> by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply >> unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their >> accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. > [PR] > I find the "contrast" between "deaccented" and "simply unaccented" > unconvincing based on the examples given since the data could be explained > as simply as due to the different times during which the compounds were > formed: lime:'n at a time when the affix was stress-accented; a'kmo:n at a > time when secondary tonal accent produced *o. What seems important from the > examples is that the affix -*men at one time had both the stress- and > tone-accents. Also, in the case of *swe'so:r, a component of *ser-, > 'female', has been proposed (see Pokorny p. 911, under 4. *ser-). Look good, it's not me that's making a distinction between deaccented and unaccented. In my algebra, unaccented vowels are treated the same, irrespective of the morphological status of the segments they are part of, just as good phonetic rules ought to work. > [JR] >> The route to this /o:/ >> must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening >> induced by the nominative marker file://-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing >> but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. > [PR] > Frankly, lengthened variants of reduced vowels need a swipe of Occam's > razor. The razor would either leave them unreduced or unlengthened; the former option would yield unaccented /-e:-/, the latter zero; we find unaccented /-o:-/. Occam shouldn't be allowed to produce wrong results. > [JR] >> In stems with underlying long >> vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. >> *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but >> acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of >> the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the >> /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. > [PR] > Well, this explanation does not explain Latin pe:s very well. And the > situation of *de/e:m-/*do/o:m- is so fluid that another example would surely > be better. pe:s does not match Gk. pous anyway, nor English foot. Since the weak cases apparently have /-e-/, an alternation po:d-/pod-/ped- could easily be levelled to pe:d-/ped-. But of course the explanation cannot be better than the material it is based on, in this case Schindler's sifting of the IE root-noun types, this being his "acrostatic" o/e type. Note that the types were established without any theory about their phonological prehistory, a part I have only added later. It should be assessed as a very positive point that purely descriptive results like Schindler's have proved open to a consistent phonological analysis without any change. > [JR] >> - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic >> vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the >> accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what >> follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but >> plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: >> /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form >> before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you >> look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced >> segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s >> of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in >> the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have >> been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. > [PR] > I would gladly grant the IE *-s (2. p. sing.), which I derive from earlier > /s[h]o/ has a different origin from nominative *-s, which I derive from > earlier /so/. > But I cannot accept that voicing of a root-final obstruent determines the > quality of the root-vowel --- at least, consistently, for we have *pe/e:d- > and *de/e:m- alongside *po/o:d- and *do/o:m-. It does not influence the root vowel, only the "thematic vowel", i.e. a vowel in suffix-final position. This must be a junctural phenomenon, for a suffix-final consonant has no such influence on a preceding vowel of the suffix itself, cf. gen. in *-te'y-s or *-me'n-s. It only works _across_ the boundary between suffix and flexive, or (in the case of absence of a flexive) across word-boundaries. That's not my discovery, Saussure saw it already, I only added the rules. > [JR] >> - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the >> causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very >> great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the >> /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. >> an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, >> developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic >> complementary distribution). > [PR] > It is the firmest of my beliefs that IE had *no* infixes. An only apparent > exception is the *metathesized* -n- in certain present stems. We agree if I may derive my o-infix from an old prefix that got metathesized (most of the time, i.e. whenever the root did not begin with *r- in which case the o- appears prefixed). IE apparently had no prefixes either, so it may in origin be a compositional member, a deictic stem making an adjectival compound with the following stem. The phonetics would be the same. > [JR] >> It is only in such forms that we find >> "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, >> because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and >> found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer >> any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a >> phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen >> as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where >> there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were >> fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. >> *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the >> ablaut worked. > [PR] > A rather complicated solution when Lehmann's simple solution is at hand: > *me'n- + *e'ye- -> *mone'ye-. That is not simple, for it does not explain the difference it is supposed to account for, viz. -o- vs. zero: Why did this not give **mne'ye-, if *me'n- + *-to'- gave *mn.to'-? Rules are supposed to work for all forms present in a language at the time, not just for some. > [JR] >> These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of >> examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their >> actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is >> shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? > [PR] > And when will you cease patronizing condescension? Yeah, that was uncalled-for; I'm working on it. Jens From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 21 14:19:41 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 07:19:41 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:38 AM 4/14/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: >>... pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >>Arthur, etc etc. >And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of >loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on >native English phonology. All of the listed words are old loans, and are fully Anglicized. They are no longer perceived as "foreign" by the majority of speakers. Thus they are indeed quite relevant to the *current* phonemic status of the sounds they include. > Loan words do not necessarily follow >the phonological rules of the borrowing language. Only before they are nativized. Once nativized, they become relevant. > In fact this >is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it >doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell >that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. 'Padre' is still perceived as a Spanish word in English. Few even know that 'authority' is NOT originally a native word. >> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc >These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. And in all of your examples the two sounds are phonemically distinct. That is /s/-/z/, and /f/-/v/ are good phoneme pairs, so this is not an argument for denying /dh/ phonemic status. Also, I am not sure I would allow word derivation processes to use NON-phonemic changes. The very fact that a sound difference can be used in word derivation is, to my mind, evidence that the difference is in fact phonemic. >But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find >something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible >for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of >as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the >graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two >sounds? In the same way that Hebrew can get by with a writing system that does not represent most vowels, and the same way Mycenian Greek could get by with a syllabic writing system that failed to represent the pronunciation of the language. Answer: a native speaker has the vocabulary *memorized*, so they *know* which words are pronounced which way, and read that *into* the written word. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 21 17:20:41 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:20:41 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00f801bfa5c1$17fb9ca0$2ac71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [Pat Ryan wrote] > In my travels around the country, > I have heard a number of pronunciations > including /hjuw/; in fact. The only time > I can remember /g/, the palatal dorsal spirant, is > here in the > South: /g|/. I've heard it throughout the West as well. My eight-year-old just said it in response to the question, "How would you tell me that something is really, really big?" "It's huge" [c-cedilla). She's never lived in the south. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Apr 21 20:30:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 15:30:44 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I haven't seen much in the way of dialect differences with dh/th but a possible anomaly is which in most of the US I've heard pronounced /blayTH/ but in the South [south of the /griysi-griyzi/ line] I usually hear it as /blayDH/. I've heard /wIDH/ as an allophone of /wITH/ in many places in the US and off the top of my head can't pin it down to one place. [snip] >These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > noun (adj.) verb [snip] Why the exception for pronouns, pronominal adjectives/deictics? >In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native >English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic >word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a >voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a >loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find >[dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a >noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that >[th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they >mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment >that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 21 16:47:00 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 17:47:00 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>[dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc A thought: If an English speaker is presented with a new word pronounced with /V:dh/ at the end, does she or he hear it as a verb? And would he or she make the similar form ending /Vth/ into the corresponding noun? Apart from wild guesses, does anyone happen to know of any evidence? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 20:37:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 15:37:29 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Bob and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 1:38 AM > On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: > At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. >> I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >> days without anyone questioning the original statement about >> complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >> which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >> pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >> examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >> find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >> Arthur, etc etc. > And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of > loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on > native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow > the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this > is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it > doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell > that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I > was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps > I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone > knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a > language you should deal with words that are native to that > language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your > list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that > have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a > loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary > distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't > mentioned any of them. > Basically, anything that comes from Greek theta is going to be > pronounced [th] in English. Apparent exceptions like Thomas or > thyme can be accounted for by tracing the path of the word into > English. But even these apparent exceptions only show that [th] > opposes [t], not that [th] opposes [dh]. Now if you can make a > similar list of words from Greek or Latin/French where original > theta is pronounced [dh] (I expect that 'rhythm' and 'logarithm' > and the similar but unrelated 'algorithm' [but not 'arithmetic'] > are special cases because of the -thm#) or you can show a list of > words of Germanic origin where intervocalic is pronounced > [th] then you would have a good point and something to look at. > If not, not. > Now "foreign word" is a perceptual category (just as "phoneme" > is) and it is how the speaker perceives the word that decides > what phonological (and sometimes morphological) rules he can > expect to apply. Moreover, the perception of whether a word is > foreign or not is likely to change over time (the longer a word > is in the language the more likely it is to eventually be > regarded as non-foreign). And once a word is considered native, > then it will treated phonologically as a native word. [PR] If I understand you correctly, we should anticipate that 'Athens' will eventually be pronounced /adhNz/. When do you expect that development? 'Athens' has been around for quite a while. Also, I doubt if one person in a hundred, outside of this list or a similar one, would identify 'ether' as a 'foreign' word. How have you (or has someone else) established that native unsophisticated speakers of English apply one set of rules to 'native' and another to 'foreign' words, and maintain a discrete category of 'foreign' words distinguished from 'native' words? [RW] > So perhaps > you are saying that [th] and [dh] are separate phonemes and > intervocalic [th] is used to mark foreign words since all native > words will have [dh] intervocalically. This does not sound > particularly convincing to me. > Let's look at what happens with words borrowed from languages > that do have /dh/. Since [dh] allegedly has phonemic status in > English, one would expect that they would be borrowed as [dh] > just as Greek theta is borrowed as [th] (cf. borrowings with /f/ > and /v/ below). But if one looks at Arabic 'dhow', although the > spelling preserves the Arabic /dh/, the pronunciation is with > [d], not [dh]. And so on. I know of no example where a word > with /dh/ in the original has been borrowed as [dh] into English > despite the frequent preservation of in the spelling, but if > there are some then I would consider them as tending to indicate > phonemic status for [dh] in English. But I wouldn't be convinced > without minimal pairs like 'focal' - 'vocal' or 'file' - 'vile' >> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc > These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs > from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > noun (adj.) verb > life live > half halve > house [haws] house [hawz] > glass glaze > grass graze > breath breathe > bath bathe > cloth clothe > wreath writhe (wreathe) > teeth (tooth) teethe > loath (loth) loathe > [An apparent exception is 'tithe' [noun and verb] but this is > rather a fossilized form than an exception. The word > originally meant "tenth" and indeed was identical with the > contemporary word for "tenth" ('te:odha') with the proper > intervocalic voiced [dh]. With the marginalization of the word > as a special kind of "tenth", it dropped out of its word class > (ordinal numbers) and did not undergo the same changes as the > rest of the group, which resulted in the levelling of the > category to a final [th]. Thus the pronunciation with final > voiced [dh] was preserved in both noun and verb [and is also > reflected in the spelling.] > [Another form that falls outside the system is 'smooth' (adj.) > and 'smoothe' (v.). Here, again, there is no contrast between > [th] and [dh]; [dh] simply appears in an unexpected place. And > while 'smooth' is ancient in English, its origin is unknown. > Contrast this with 'sooth' (n.) and 'soothe' (v.).] > Morphophonemic variants are generally not considered distinct > phonemes in that environment. At most they are considered > morphophonemes and at the least simple allophones because the > distribution of sounds is governed by rule (in this case a > morphological-phonological rule) and hence the value of the sound > is predictable from its environment. Morphophonemic alternation > is not sufficient to establish phonemic status (although it is > often a prelude to it). Morphophonemic variants may very well be > phonemically distinct in other environments, but it is the basic > precept of internal reconstruction that morphophonemic variants > can normally be traced back to some archephoneme in the > pre-language. This is one reason why unrelated words is usually > a requirement for minimal pairs. [PR] Good point, that seems to be overlooked. [RW] >> That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that >> of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly >> controversial view > Phonemic status is easy to show for /s/ and /z/, somewhat more > difficult for /f/ and /v/ (but it exists), and very difficult for > [th] and [dh]. > If you look at a list of English words that begin with [v] you > will find very few native words ('vat' and 'vixen' are about it). > But both of these are dialect borrowings in standard English > replacing earlier 'fat' (vessel) and 'fyxen' (feminine of 'fox' > with '-en' feminine marker and umlaut). However, modern 'fat' > ("fat", cf. G. 'Fett') and 'vat' ("large vessel", cf. G. 'Fass' > [scharfes s]) are clearly a minimal pair since neither is likely > to be recognized as a foreign word. On the other hand, 'focal' > and 'vocal' are both recognized as foreign words, but the > distinction /f/-/v/ is sufficient to differentiate them. [PR] I dispute whether the average person would consider /voist/ ('voiced') a *foreign* word as opposed to /foist/('foist'). [RW] > Speakers now have to recognize inherent [v] sounds in words to > distinguish them from both inherent [f] sounds and from [v] as a > morphophonemic variant of /f/. Therefore /f/ and /v/ are separate > phonemes (almost a borrowed phonemic distinction, but made > possible by the mophophonemic alternation of [f] and [v]). As > for 'of' and 'off', this is a stress difference. 'Off' is simply > a lexicalized stressed form of 'of' (this is why 'off of' as in > "get off of the grass" is considered substandard). >> ("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to >> hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the >> Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken >> as a simple fact. > I dare say that most descriptions of modern English do take this > as a simple fact (just as many dictionaries will tell you that > pronominal determiners are pronouns) and therefore not worth > investigating. But facts are not data. Data exists in nature. > Facts are observations about data. Facts are a matter of > interpretation and facts can be wrong. [PR] It is, perhaps, inevitable that we cannot reach agreement about 'phoneme' when such common words as 'fact' are defined so individually. The first definition of 'fact' in AHD is "1. something known with certainty"; and the third: "3. something that has been objectively verified". It is impossible for me to regard a 'datum' (AHD: "1. an assumed, given, measured, or otherwise determined *fact* or proposition . . .") as other than a 'fact', and I would object to "assumed . . . proposition" as being a proper part of the definition. [RW] > Sometimes it is necessary > to go beyond surface appearances to see if the facts are correct > interpretations of the data. What I want to know is what are the > data on which this "simple fact" of the phonemic status of [th] > and [dh] in English is based. In this case, it would seem that > [th, dh] just ride along on the coattails of [s, z] and [f, v] in > the belief that if [s, z] and [f, v] split then [th, dh] must > have too. > The creation of the allophones of original /s/, /f/, and /th/ > happened for all at the same time: unvoiced spirants between > voiced sounds following a stressed vowel became voiced. This did > not increase the number of contrasts (phonemes), merely the number > of allophones (/s/ [s, z]; /f/ [f, v]; /th/ [th, dh]). The > phonemic splits came later and for different reasons. First came > morphophonemic alternation followed by, for /s/ and /z/, the use > of /z/ to create expressive and imitative words; for /f/ and /v/, > the need to differentiate borrowed words with inherent [f] and > [v]; and, for [th] and [dh] -- well, I just can't think of > anything that compels the use of [th] and [dh] for making > distinctions. If you can provide something, I'd be glad to > listen to it. But it will have to be better than loanwords that > don't contrast with anything else and morphophonemic alternations > or parallelism with [s, z] and [f, v]. > But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find > something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible > for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of > as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the > graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two > sounds? Now English does not have the world's greatest fit > between writing and sounds. The same sounds can be written with > different characters and the same characters can be used to write > different sounds. In some cases, there is no way to tell how > certain written combinations are to be spoken. There is no rule > to tell you how a word like 'cough' is to be pronounced. One > simply has to learn the pronunciation with the word. But with > [th] and [dh] this is not necessary, even though there is no clue > in the writing (with the exception of <-e> in verbs which marks > the fact that the preceding is voiced). Otherwise one would > have to learn the pronunciation of every word containing > separately. [PR] As you seem to be acknowledging, learned pronunciation has really no bearing on spelling, or each dialect would have a separate orthography. [RW] > When dealing with phonemes, if you know the pronunciation, you > can distinguish a word from all other words with similar > sounds except for the different phonemes. Phonemes distinguish > between words when there is no other criterion for distinguishing > them and are completely arbitrary. Thus there is no rule > (phonological, morphological, or syntactical) for distinguishing > between /fat/ and /bat/ except the rule that says that /f/ and > /b/ are different phonemes. The phonemes /f/ and /b/ don't tell > you anthing about these words except that they are different. If > /f/ were always used only in verbs and /b/ were always used only > in nouns, then one would have to take another look at the > phonemic status of /f/ and /b/. > When dealing with [th] and [dh] if you recogize the word > category, you will know what the sound is. You don't have to > learn the pronunciation with the word except in a very few cases > (like 'rhythm'). Otherwise, even for words that you may not be > familiar with like 'thole' or 'wether' or 'heterochthonous' you > will know whether [th] or [dh] is correct. Words such as > 'blithe' which can be pronounced with either [th] or [dh] (not as > a matter of stress, but simply free variation) do not speak > strongly in favor of phonemic status for these two sounds > (athough it doesn't necessarily speak against it either). > So once again, the only native words where [th] and [dh] contrast > is 'thigh' and 'thy'. 'Thy' belongs to a class of words that > always has [dh] in this position. 'Thigh' belongs to a class of > words (not really a significant class, merely the complement of > the other class) that always has [th] in this position. The > apparent opposition between [th] and [dh] in this example is just > a historical accident (in much the same way that homynyms come > into existence through historical accidents) since the original > distinction between these words did not depend on this > opposition. Thus this "minimal pair" is not adequate to establish > [th] and [dh] as separate phonemes in my opinion since > distribution of sounds by rule is a more important criterion even > if the rules are not phonological. > And again, if you have evidence for the phonemic status of [th] > and [dh] in English (and I don't mean evidence that they are > recognized as different sounds [phones] or that they are > morphophonemic variants), I will be happy to evaluate it. I just > haven't found any that I consider convincing despite the fact that > most grammars will list them as separate phonemes and put forth > such "minimal pairs" as 'thigh' - 'thy' or 'ether' - 'either' or > 'wreath' - 'wreathe' as evidence. > Now there is no reason why [th] and [dh] can't be separate > phonemes in English. They might very well be. Or they might > well be on their way to becoming separate phonemes. But if they > are, one can reasonably expect there to be some evidence of it. > If [th] and [dh] are different phonemes in English, then it is an > unused phonemic distinction. And since it is unused, it can't be > proved that they aren't phonemically distinct just because there > is no evidenc that they are. What can be shown is that [th, dh] > are allophones of /th/ that resulted from the original voicing of > spirants in a voiced environment and that these allophones can be > used as morphophonemic variants. But without unequivocal > evidence that they are used as separate phonemes, it is safer to > assume that they are not. > In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native > English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic > word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a > voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a > loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find > [dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a > noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that > [th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they > mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment > that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. [PR] A very eloquent presentation of a point of view. However, apparently, it hinges on one key concept: the distinction in the minds of native English speakers between 'native' and 'foreign' words, a distinction that I believe is non-provable. Furthermore, Old Norse gives us both /raiz/ ('raise') and /rais/ ('race'). If anyone outside of an etymologist knew these origins, of what possibly use could it be? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 20:50:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 15:50:31 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 10:15 AM > At 09:54 PM 4/4/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >> [PRp] >> I would have to say that you are wrong. [SF] >> There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a >> component of a minimal pair. > Examples have been given that show otherwise. [PR] Sorry, I must have missed those. How about rehearsing those "examples" one more time? >> [PRp] >> I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [SF] > Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the > reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a > rule. [PR] Generalizations are dandy but specifics are more helpful. Examples? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 21:54:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:54:57 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Bob and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 11:12 AM > On Tue, 4 Apr, proto-language wrote: > >> [RWp] >> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >> condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >> [PRp] > [ moderator snip ] >> There is no phoneme in any language which has not been >> established as a component of a minimal pair. [RW] > So what? [PR] Admitting this puts us on a better track. [RW] > Do you assume therefore that anything that is a > component of a minimal pair is a phoneme? I know that you have > said that using logic is childish, but you really ought to try it > sometime. [PR] I have never in my entire life said or implied that "using logic is childish" or anything like it. On the contrary, I try on principle as well as I am able to consistently apply logic to all questions in my life. To assert that I have said such a thing is inaccurate, mildly defamatory, and a token of incipient memory problems. To answer your other question, if one adds the semantic qualification (eliminating pairs like 'half/halve'), yes, I do believe that any one segment of a minimal pair is, at least, synchronically, a phoneme --- and I reject the qualification of 'native/foreign' perception as naif in extremis (leaving pairs like 'ether/either'). Education entails a respect for the written word but, even a linguist such as yourself, might remember that a pre-school child who learns the words 'either' and 'ether' is not going to be aware automatically or instructed that 'ether' follows different phonological rules than 'either'. [RW] > Saying that anything that occurs in a minimal pair is a phoneme > because all phonemes occur in minimal pairs is like saying that > anything that is black is a raven because all ravens are black. > I know you won't understand what I'm talking about, but any > textbook on logic will tell you that for any universal statement > (all S are P) the simple converse (all P are S) is not valid. > The minimum valid conversion of "all S are P" is "some P are S". [PR] In looking at the logic textbook I studied under Professor Wilfred Payne some 40 years ago, which, of course, has a section on undistributed middles, another section which describes logical fallacies, including argumenta ad hominem, which I consider "I know you won't understand what I'm talking about") as a good example. Employing logical fallacies in a discussion seems to me to be the definition of displaying illogic, would you not agree? > [RWp] >>> The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English >>> minimal pair >>> 'thigh' / 'thy' >>> (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] >>> is clearly marginal) >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). [PRp] >> That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic >> status for both. [RW] > Yes, of course you would. I wouldn't expect you to do anything > else. [RWp] >>> This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >>> distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments >> [PRp] >> What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? [RW] > An environment that is voiced. [PR] Sibylline answers such as this do not help elucidate problems. [PRp] >> What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [RWp] > This is a morphophonemic alternation. You can make as long a > list as you want of such alternations and wherever there is a > distinction between [th] and [dh], [th] will occur in a > substantive and [dh] will appear in a verb that is derived from > it. Very rarely, [dh] will appear also in the substantive, but > it will always appear in the verb. > [RW] >>> and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. >> [PR] >> I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological >> conditioning factors. [RW] > And here you would have the full support of Stanley Friesen. But > rules are rules, whether they are phonological, morphological, or > lexical. It is just a question of how much one area of language > can affect another. [PR] How refreshing to be in agreement with someone on the list! > [RWp] >>> Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two >>> sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a >>> single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds >>> can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate >>> phonemes.' >> [PRp] >> I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [RW] > Which is your strongest argument. Which is why you should be > supporting my argument instead of claiming that distribution by > rule is less important than minimal pairs in determining > phonemicity. [PR] What I do not think you grasp is that I have arrived at a similar position to yours based on a semantic qualification although rejecting your 'native/foreign' perception qualification. [RW] > You don't seem to realize that, while what I have > said does not directly support your position, it does give you > a stronger position to argue from. I know that thinking things > through is not your forte, but you really should learn to think > in terms of how the various parts of a problem relate to each > other. [PR] This gratuitous insult speaks nothing for your argument. [RW] > You say that the distribution of *e and *o is governed > by rule and that only a minimal pair would prove their phonemic > status. And I say that even a minimal pair wouldn't necessarily > demonstrate their phonemicity so long as they can still be > predicted by rule and then you say no, all phonemes occur in > minimal pairs so anything that occurs in a minimal pair must be a > phoneme. And you claim that this is a rational line of thought? [PR] In my opinion, it is possibly your lack of rigorous logic which is causing the problem. And, you are recasting the argument in your terms. If we are dealing with a present/perfect alteration of vowel, my reason for rejecting such a pair as minimal would be from the stanpdoint of their only minimally differentiated semantics --- not "governed by rule". My view of the Ablaut is that it was, at least, originally phonologically motivated although some examples, like *wo'ida, might be attributable not to deletion of the reduplication but to simple analogy with forms like *de'dorka. We may never know a definitive answer to that question. [RW]] > But if you claim that [th] and [dh] must be phonemes because they > occur as morphophonemic variants as you did above (bath, bathe), > then you have lost your argument about *e and *o because they are > also morphophonemic variants. Indeed, it was in part their > morphophonemic alternation that led, through internal > reconstruction, to the laryngeal theory. [PR] I am not sure I understand your point here. [RW] > So if morphophonemic > alternation (conditioned variance) demonstrates phonemicity, then > *e and *o are separate phonemes. Which position do you want to > support? [PR] I believe I have made that fairly clear above. >> [RWp] >>> Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but >>> contrastive environments are a clincher. >> [PRp] >> I find this totally unacceptable. [RW] > Yes, I can see why it would confuse you. [PR] Another gratuitous insult! If there is any confusion, it is about the decorum of a discussion. [RW] > The second part of the > statement is not entirely clear. So I will try to explain it in > more detail and write very slowly and distinctly. [PR] Write as comes naturally. [RW] > Minimal pairs is a heuristic. A heuristic is a way of finding > things that might prove significant. Minimal pairs is a useful > way of looking for phonemes. Now if a heuristic works regularly, > people tend to start thinking of it as a law. Minimal pairs is > so successful at predicting phonemes that often no further > investigation is done and a minimal pair is considered a > sufficient condition for phonemicity. This is the position taken > by you and Stanley Friesen (and probably a lot of other people). [PR] So, I am not the only illogical, confused person out there. What a relief! [RW] > But a lot of people also realize that minimal pairs is not a > necessary condition for establishing phonemicity (I realize that > you probably don't understand this stuff about "necessary" and > "sufficient" conditions because it has to do with logic, but bear > with me) and this is where you and Stanley part company. [PR] Strangely, I believe I can handle the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient". As I have indicated above, I believe minimal pairs are "necessary" but not "sufficient" lacking the semantic qualification. [RW] > Now I believe that minimal pairs is not even a sufficient > condition for establishing phonemicity, particularly when the > number of minimal pairs is minimal. I believe that distribution > of sounds by rule is more important than what may appear to be > minimal pairs in determining whether two sounds are distinct > phonemes or not. I also believe that the rule that determines > the distribution of the sounds does not have to be phonological. > This is where you and Stanley join up again, in the belief that > the conditioning environment must be phonetic. [PR] Absolutely correct. [RW] > What I meant by "contrastive environments" is, as I said, not > entirely clear from the statement (but I'm not entirely sure that > saying "non-contrasting" would have been better). [PR] A "rule" apparently so difficult to articulate must be rather tricky (or arbitrary) to apply. [RW] > What I had in > mind is that the different phonemes provide the only contrast, > and this contrast must be completely arbitrary for the two sounds > to be separate phonemes. That is to say that the phonemes > themselves can tell you nothing about the words involved except > that they are different. If a sound regularly occurs only in a > certain class of words and a similar but different sound > regularly occurs elsewhere, then this is complementary > distribution. And complementary distribution of similar sounds > points to no phonemic distinction between them. [PR] If this were really an example of logic applied, I confess to preferring illogicality. When you are allowed to introduce non-phonological characteristics (such as "pronominal') into phonological explanations, you have opened Pandora's box to any kind of cockamamie qualification to explain phonological facts (or data, or whatever you prefer). [RW] > If you can > always predict which sound will be present from the environment, > then the sounds are not different phonemes (in that environment). [PR] And how does your theory predict /dher/ ('there')? Is it 'pronominal' or is this the 'adverbial' class of exceptions? [RW] > Phonemes should tell you nothing about words except that they are > different (i.e., they shouldn't tell you that one word is a noun > and the other is a verb or that one word is a pronoun and the > other is not, or that one is singular and the other plural, etc.). [PRp] >> Show me contrastive phonological environments. [RW] > Sorry, "phonological" wasn't mentioned in my statement, so you > will have to provide your own. [PR] Does /dher/ tell you something that it is not telling me? >> [RWp] >>> As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, >>> similar items that are in complementary distribution are usually >>> aspects of the same thing. But believe it or not, linguists will >>> still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds and different >>> analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes claimed for >>> a particular language. [PR] If they are using identical definitions, there should be no legitimate disagreement. >> [PR] >> Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. [RW] > Well, so long as you disagree with everything I say, even if you > have to destroy your own arguments to do it, just because I have > said it, this is doubtless true. [PR] Methinks the lady protesteth too much. I have nothing against you or anyone on this list personally. [RW] > But I wouldn't call it fate, > I'd call it a conditioned reflex. I myself would have phrased it > differently, and would have said that I will agree with you when > you are right, but perhaps this is actually exactly the same > thing that you have said. [PR] So, I am a contrary Mary. My arguments are motivated solely by perversity. Do you really believe that? [PRp] >> I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional >> linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. [RW] > I will let you answer this one yourself because: > On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > >Whether any given linguist did or did not accept the validity of > >my studies is not a proof or disproof of my work. > Now here is something that I can agree with you on. Who agrees > or disagrees with a theory is not proof pro or con. Who makes a > statement does not affect its validity. Who proposes or accepts > the theory is immaterial. It matters not whether the proponent > of a theory is well or poorly educated, is a "professional > linguist" (PL) or a known crackpot (not necessarily different > things), has been convicted of income tax evasion, or wets the > bed. All that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. [PR] Essentially, I would agree. But a consensus of "poorly educated people" would not be a desideratum whereas a consensus of professional linguists would be a sufficient but not necessary indication of eventual vindication. [RW] > A theory is not automatically wrong because it is proposed by > Patrick Ryan, and it is not automatically correct because it is > proposed by a PL. So whether a PL agrees with your ideas or not > is irrelevant, as you yourself pointed out on 27 May 1999. > Obviously PL's are not automatically correct in your mind or you > wouldn't be telling PL's that they are wrong on a daily basis. If > PL's are always right, then citing a PL is a good argument, but > if they are only right when they agree with you and wrong > otherwise, it rather vitiates your appeal to the authority of an > unnamed "professional linguist". This doesn't mean that you are > wrong though; it just means that it isn't a valid argument. And > all that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. [PR] When you're right, you're right. But, if you think I am casting myself as a Devil's Advocate against professional linguists, you are wrong. I agree with them far more than I disagree; and, in the basal question (*e/*o phonemicity), I do substantially agree with at least one profssional linguist of high regard: Professor Winfred Lehmann. To get back to the point you seem to be attempting to make, if every linguist agreed with me, we could all be wrong, but the burden on the corrector would be very heavy. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Apr 21 15:47:55 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 10:47:55 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> mclasutt at brigham.net 04/13/00 11:49PM >>> [Larry Trask] > This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. But it > is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of > two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single > phoneme. [Robert Whiting] > I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to > establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [Pat Ryan] > I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language > which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. I have to disagree with all three of you. If you have a minimal pair, there is no question that you have a phonemic contrast. However, you can have a phonemic contrast without having a minimal pair and with a rule for the distribution. Aside from the familiar English angma vs. h, which is a good if peculiar example, there is the matter of /n/ vs. /l/ in Yoruba. Ladefoged argued in 1964 that these were in complementary distribution, [l] before oral vowels and [n] before nasal vowels. (Yoruba has a phonemic contrast between oral and nasal vowels, and nasal consonants can occur in roots only before nasal vowels.) However, I argued in a 1971 paper that the contrast had to be phonemic because the only cases of alternation were in CV words of the shape niN, where -N is an ASCII diacritic marking the preceding vowel as nasal. In these cases, if the vowel elided before a vowel-initial noun, a very common occurrence, the /n/ became /l/. There are, however, verbs beginning with /n/ but with one of the other nasal vowels, /aN/ or /uN/. With these verbs, if the vowel elides, the initial /n/ remains /n/. The /n/~/l/ alternation, then, is morphophonemic and /n/ and /l/ are separate phonemes even though their distribution can be stated by rule and they are in complementary distribution. There is, incidentally, dialect evidence to indicate the Standard Yoruba /niN/ forms represent a diachronic merger of what survive as /li/ and /niN/ forms in those dialects. [Robert Whiting] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: > 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both > [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some > would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what > occurred with /s/ and /z/). English /th/ vs. /dh/ is a curious case. The contrast didn't become phonemic till the 18th c., and even then the conditions for it were strange and non-phonological. There were already some final cases of the contrast, as in those dialects that had lost final schwa, so that "breath/breathe", "wreath/wreathe" and the like were in contrast, but there was no initial contrast until the function words, largely deictics and largely unstressed, laxed the initial /th/ to /dh/. However, there was a sizable set of content words, like "theology" that had initial unstressed syllables beginning with /th/, and none of these voiced. An oddity is that the function word "thither", which is rare in contemporary ModE, has initial /th/ for all AmE speakers I've consulted. American dictionaries regularly show /dh-/ as a second pronunciation, and British dictionaries I've checked either give only /dh-/ or give /th-/ as a second choice. Apparently Americans who know the word generally don't treat it as a function word. Given that the /s~z/ and /f~v/ contrasts had phonemicized early in ME and that SE English initial voicing had little influence, the late phonemicization of initial /th~dh/ looks rather like a nice example of pattern congruity. Herb Stahlke From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 22 14:58:43 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 17:58:43 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Apr, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[Larry Trask] >This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. >But it is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the >distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't >be assigned to a single phoneme. >[Robert Whiting] >I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to >establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >[Pat Ryan] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no >phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component >of a minimal pair. >[Me] >This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs >out with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I must agree that what Pat says is not true, but I also must say that I am not ready to throw minimal pairs out either. Minimal pairs are a useful heurisitic, but that is all they are. While enough minimal pairs may be convincing in themselves if they occur in a variety of different environments, a minimal pair in itself may be evidence for, but not necessarily proof of, a phonemic distinction. I hope you can see the difference. Because of the definition of phoneme, you really have to consider the entire system before you can declare phonemicity. >I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal >pair. I think that you truly have to consider both 'teeth' and 'teethe' as morphophonemic variants of 'tooth'. >Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of >teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a >voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction >between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening >of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the >voicing). Historically, this is nonsense. the lengthing of [i:] in 'teethe' is a matter of stress. It is a matter of vowel quantity, not vowel quality. Both 'teeth' and 'teethe' have [i:] and if the ending is not stressed, both have the same vowel quality. The [i:] in both 'teeth' and 'teethe' is the result of umlaut caused by the addition of the plural ending (beginning with '-i') and the verbal suffix (beginning with '-j'; exactly the same change that took place in 'doom' - 'deem'), respectively. The fact that many speakers introduce this additional distinction by stressing the ending of the verb suggests that they do not consider the [th] - [dh] distinction to be sufficient (i.e., they do not consider it phonemic). If 'tooth' had not preserved its umlaut plural (i.e., if 'tooth' [+ plural] --> *'tooths'), the question wouldn't arise. The 'e' on the end of 'teethe' is secondary, to indicate that it is voiced. The form was probably 'te:thian' when the voicing took place. The loss of final shwa in English (cf. Eng. 'help', Ger. 'hilfe') freed for such secondary functions. But synchronically, there is a difference between [th] - [dh] pairs. [dh] always indicates the verb. Very rarely, there is no distinction between verb and substantive ('tithe' [n.] / 'tithe' [v.]; 'smooth' / 'smoothe'), but this can hardly be a basis for claiming that [th] and [dh] are different phonemes. Allophonic splits occur when a conditioning environment causes a sound to change in that environment but not outside it. There are those who claim that when the conditioning environment is subsequently lost, then the allophones become phonemes because they are no longer predictable from the *phonological* environment. But I would maintain that if the distinction between the sounds is still predictable on the basis of the grammar, then the sounds are not fully phonemic because they can still be predicted from the morphological/grammatical environment. Phonemes should not let you predict meaning. If they do, then phonemes become a unit of meaning (as some, like Pat, have tried to claim), and this violates the rule of duality of patterning (sounds express meaning, but the sounds themselves have no inherent meaning). Phonemes should tell you nothing about the meaning of a word, whether it is grammatical meaning or lexical meaning (there is a large grey area here, that is not yet well researched, called sound symbolism). If they do, then you have Pat's Proto-Language(C). >But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) >English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, >sooth/soothe, etc. 'ether' [borrowed word] - 'either' [native word] 'thigh' [non-pronoun] - 'thy' [pronoun] 'wreath' [noun] - 'wreathe' [verb] 'sooth' [noun] - 'soothe' [verb] Now these distinctions wouldn't mean much in themselves, but when you consider that these distinctions based on the presence of [th] or [dh] are *always* valid, then you get the impression that as minimal pairs they aren't worth much. If you sometimes found intervocalic [th] in the [native word] column or initial [dh] in the [non-pronoun] column or final [th] in the verb column, then one would be justified in claiming a phonemic distinction between [th] and [dh]. Otherwise we can say that all words that have [th] in a voiced environment will be loans, any word that has [dh] in initial position will be a pronoun or a deictic word and any word that has [dh] in final position will be the verb part of a noun-verb pair. Beyond that, it is interesting to note that each of these "minimal pairs" is a special case of one sort or another. For 'ether' - 'either' there is a dialectal variant of 'either' that clearly distinguishes it from 'ether'. Both 'thigh' and 'thy' have long and distinguished phonological careers and the fact that they have ended up with only [th] and [dh] to differentiate them phonetically is simply a historical accident. Were one of them not a pronoun, they would have simply ended up as homynyms (like 'knight' and 'night' or 'right', 'rite', 'write', and 'wright'). 'Wreath' and 'wreathe' are also a special case becuase the actual verb derived from 'wreath' is 'writhe'. 'Wreathe' is a back formation from 'wreath' influenced by a ME variant 'wrethen' of 'writhe'. 'Sooth' and 'soothe' is one that I don't have an explanation for. By all rights (and in parallel with 'tooth' - 'teethe') the verb should have been *'seethe' (<-- OE 'so:dhian' [v.] <-- 'so:th') but it isn't. Of course, there is already a verb 'seethe', but it didn't have this form in OE ('se:odhan'). Something happened to block the umlaut in 'soothe'. I'd be interested to learn what it might have been. >However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >'uncle' /ata/, etc. Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning environment that prevented it has been lost historically. I'll tell you what: Let's assume that English has a phoneme (let's call it [=] just for consistency) that prevents an intervocalic dental spirant from being voiced. Now let's insert this phoneme in a word like 'ether' which shows an unvoiced intervocalic dental spirant /i:=ther/. Good -- now we no longer have a minimal pair 'ether' - 'either'. Now let's assume that English inserts this phoneme in all loanwords that have an unvoiced dental spirant in a voiced environment. Voila -- a phonetic environment that explains why loanwords have unvoiced intervocalic [th]. Now all we need is a rule that says /=th/ --> [dh] /__ m# and all intervocalic [th] in English is accounted for by phonological rules. Hey, this is fun. >On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, >With all the possibilities of root structure in Panamint, there just >aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic inventory has had to be >determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using permissible >initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. I agree with this completely. Minimal pairs are a heuristic that is useful for finding possible phonemes. When you don't have them, you have to use something else. >[Robert Whiting] >The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English minimal >pair: 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic >status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal >pair (although some would doubtless claim that there has been a >phonemic split similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). >[Me] >I disagree with Robert on this one. No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that either requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate phonemes. I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and how the evidence proves it one way or the other. >The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is >no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes >(depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the >same footing as other phonemes in the language). I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or /oj/ occur only in certain classes of words or only as morphophonemic alternants? Show me that in all the words where /zh/ occurs that /zh/ limits or restricts the meanings that it can have and I will grant you the point. It is said that /ng/ only occurs in word final position, but even this is not true (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be difficult to establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: places where these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be predicted by rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the point. >All phonemes do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence >equally impressive. Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and >unpredictability factors all point toward them being separate >phonemes. While the evidence for separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as >overwhelming as the evidence separating /s/ and /z/, it is still >enough to compel a separation on synchronic grounds. While I agree with the first statement, the second does not follow from it. Patterns of the occurrences of [th] and [dh] overwhelmingly show complementary distribution of the sounds and either lack of contrasts or predictable morphophonemic alternation. Morphophonemic alternations may be the beginnings of phonmeic split, but until the sounds are used as oppositions outside of the morphonemic environment, I don't think it is legitimate to construe them as separate phonemes, even if the original conditioning environment has been lost. Synchronic grounds don't really have anything to do with it. Synchronic rules are still rules and most will agree that synchronic rules recapitulate diachronic rules. They don't always have the same basis, but by and large they have the same results. The diachronic rules voiced [th] in verbs because it was in a voiced environment. Through the erosion of the infinitive ending, the voiced [dh] ended up word final while the substantive retained word final [th]. The synchronic rule simply says that you make a verb out of a substantive with final [th] by voicing the [th]. The synchronic rule doesn't reduplicate the diachronic events, but it does have the same result. And the synchronic rule is what someone who is learning the language has to learn. And through it he knows that any native English word that ends with [dh] will be a verb and that it should have a corresponding substantive ending in [th] (with a couple of exceptions as noted above). Now if there were other English words ending in [dh] that weren't verbs (as in 'cliff' vs. 'five' as opposed to 'life' vs. 'live'), one would have a case for the phonemicity of [dh] as one has a case for the phonemicity of [v]. But as long as final [dh] occurs only in verbs and the only way that it contrasts with [th] is through a substantive with the same root, I don't see a case for phonemicity. It is just distribution by rule. >[Pat Ryan] >What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is >environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? >[Me] Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This >is not appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the >phonological or morphophonological rules are still productive. Thanks for trying to explain to Pat, John, but although historically the voicing of [th] in verbs was phonologically conditioned and resulted in an allophonic split, loss of the conditioning environment does not make the synchronic rule any less valid. The synchronic rule is still there. One even notes that the rule for verbs has been maintained against the devoicing of intervocalic [dh] in the ordinal numbers once they had lost their voiced environment. The example of 'tithe', which was once simply the same as the ordinal 'tenth' (OE 'te:odha' [n.] - 'te:odhian' [v.] shows this clearly. If the voicing rule for verbs were no longer valid, the verbs would end in [th] just as the ordinal numbers do. The rule may not be productive any longer in the sense that new verb-noun pairs are not formed by this rule, but that doesn't mean that the synchronic rule doesn't exist. Now one could always invent a dummy, non-phonetic phoneme as was done in Comanche that can be inserted to show where the conditioning environment was lost (and graphemically, this is the purpose of the final 'e' on the verbs in English) but this is obviously just a device to provide a "phonological" explanation for why some intervocalic stops didn't undergo lenition and thus maintain the allophonic status of [p, v] without having to resort to a diachronic explanation. I don't see that there is really any difference in the outcome. >[Robert Whiting] >Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds >cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single >phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be >stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' >[Me] >The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you saying that allophones automatically become separate phonemes when the phonological conditioning environment that maintains their allophonic identity is lost? And that they are phonemes even if they never contrast in an environment that can't be predicted, so long as the basis for predicting the environment is not phonological? Now if this is what you believe, I am not saying that it is wrong. It is more a matter of how one sees the interaction of the various parts of language. If the determination of phonemes is an entirely phonological process, then it is quite correct. But if other areas or language can affect phonology, then it is not necessarily so. Again, it is a question of how much one area of language can affect the others. A matter of where you draw your lines and how you make your definitions. There are a number of issues about phonology, morphology, and lexicon that are too lengthy to go into here, but in a summary fashion let me say that the basic function of language requires certain relationships between phonology and morphology. Languages express meaning (morphemes) through sounds (phonemes). But the sounds, taken in isolation have no inherent meaning of their own associated with them. For this reason, phonemes can indicate differences in meaning, but are not units of meaning. Sounds that can only indicate a functional difference (a difference in grammatical meaning) when contrasted with a similar sound should not be considered a fully functional phonemes in the environment in which it can only mark this difference. Such a sound can be called a morphophoneme to indicate that it is restricted to contrasts between morphological variants of the same word. But if your definition requires that any sound that contrasts with another to produce a different meaning is a phoneme, then morphophonemes must be considered phonemes. >There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun into a verb by >voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, e.g., >'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. The fact that it is no longer productive does not make it any less of a rule. It is not an archaic rule. It is a rule that exists in modern English. It just isn't a productive rule. If it were no longer a rule the verb from 'breath' would be 'breath'. It is no longer a productive rule because the infinitive is no longer formed in the same way. There was no archaic rule that said make a verb out of a noun by voicing a final spirant. The spirant was voiced because it occured in a voiced environment in the infinitive. When the distinctive form of the infinitive was lost (i.e., the conditioning environment was lost), the voiced/voiceless distinction in final position was maintained to distinguish verb from noun and that is where the synchronic rule came from. But this is still a morphophonemic distinction because this is the only place that it occurs and it is regular and predictable. >Even the intervocalic voicing of /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., >path [th] and paths [dh], but path's [th]. The (morphophonemic) voicing of spirants that occurs before the plural marker [s, z] is regularly neutralized before the possessive singular (it is a different rule): sing. pl. poss. sing. thief thieves thief's life lives life's sheaf sheaves sheaf's path [th] paths [dhz] path's [ths] wreath [th] wreaths [dhz] wreath's [ths] The voiced - voiceless opposition of singular and plural is also regularly neutralized in loan words chief chiefs (not *chieves) faith [th] faiths [ths] math [th] maths [ths] and occasionally in native words death deaths [ths] and sometimes both occur hoof hoofs ~ hooves But there is no unpredictable contrast. >These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and >thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for >these pairs. I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' so it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and [pavi] aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words are both native in Comanche). 'Thigh' - 'thy' is just a historical accident. You say that synchronicity demands that [th] and [dh] be separate phonemes and that non-productive forms cannot be used for synchronic phonemicization and then you give me evidence based on loanwords and obsolete forms. Not good enough. >Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it in >a theoretical sense. But it's very good for describing the evidence. Perhaps the theory needs some reworking so that it accounts for the evidence better? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 19:51:43 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 14:51:43 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2000 11:49 PM [PR] First let me thank you for your thoughtful and interesting response. > [Pat Ryan] > I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language > which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. > [JM] > This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs out > with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I think that you truly have to > consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal pair. [PR] Is not the question being obscured by considering synchrony and diachrony simultaneously? I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that 'teeth' and 'teethe' had, in the *past*, an identical voiceless fricative in root-final position, and that only subsequent to the feature +Voice being transferred to it with the suppression of the following final vowel, did it *become* voiced; but, at *present*, the difference between the voiced and unvoiced fricatives signals a semantic difference if minimal, i.e. the difference between a noun and a verb. If I apply the same rationale to the question of *e/*o-Ablaut, I would be forced to concede that both *e and *o were phonemic in earliest IE (since, broadly, the alternation signals an analogous minimal semantic [grammatical] difference), which I am not prepared to do at this time. So, I would admit that 'teeth/teethe' does *not* establish two phonemes (/th/, */dh/), and would have to say that /th/ has a historically conditioned allophone of /dh/; 'historically', because obviously the sequence CVC(e) does not currently condition voicing in the consonant before the muted (e): e.g. 'safe'. On the other hand, you have furnished below some examples that do, in my opinion, establish /dh/ as an English phoneme: e.g. 'ether/either' on a synchronic basis. The only example with which I would have a real problem is 'sooth/soothe' since 'sooth' in the sense of 'soft' is obsolescent. [JM] > Historically, yes, these two > forms were not (the 'e' on the end of teethe was a phonetic element which > put the voiceless /th/ in a voicing environment, but synchronically, there > is no distinction between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the > lengthening of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not > cause the voicing). But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least > American) English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, > sooth/soothe, etc. > However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic and > the historical changes that have further obscured them in Comanche, this > language is full of pairs that look very much like minimal pairs on the > surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' and [pavi] 'older brother' > look very much like a minimal pair. However, they represent /pa=pi/ and > /papi/ respectively. (The = is a phoneme in Comanche that prevents the > lenition of a following stop. It is fully justified on morphophonemic > grounds without relying on the historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and > Shoshoni which is cognate.) There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' > /a=ta/ versus [ara] 'uncle' /ata/, etc. [PR] In my opinion, in defining a phoneme, we are only justified on operating with synchronic data. [JM] > On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, 2Panamint is a good counterexample. > In languages where typical roots are monosyllabic (like English), one may > find many minimal pairs, but even in English, where there are 7392 possible > one syllable words of the structure (C)V(C), there are only 1729 of these > that actually occur in my dialect of English. For example, the largest > "minimal set" consists of the frame [_ir]. I have 'peer, tier, beer, deer, > gear, cheer, jeer, fear, sear, sheer, hear, veer, mere, near, leer, rear, > we're, year'. Notice that [kir], [thir], [dhir], [zir], [zhir], [ngir], and > [hwir] do not exist. [PR] We seem to be proceeding from very different outlooks. To me, that there is no */hwir/ is not material to the question. It suffices that pairs like /hwer/ ('where') and /wer/ ('wear') exist. But, I believe we must have at least *one* minimal pair for a phoneme to be established. [JM] > There are also no words in my dialect that start with a [g] and end in a > voiceless alveopalatal affricate. In Panamint, the typical root structure is > CV(X)CV (X is a gemination marker, an /h/, or a nasal). The bisyllabic > structure of the typical root means that minimal pairs are far less likely > than they are in English. For example, there is a minimal pair tykka (y is > barred i) 'eat'/nykka 'dance'/-pykka 'suffer' (this one, however, never > occurs without a noun incorporated). That's the largest one I've ever been > able to find (and -pykka is an iffy inclusion since it never occurs in > isolation). There's no kykka, kwykka, ?ykka, sykka, hykka, tsykka, mykka, > ngykka, ngwykka, jykka, or wykka. With all the possibilities of root > structure in Panamint, there just aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic > inventory has had to be determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using > permissible initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. [PR] As you know from what I have written above, I cannot accept this. > [Robert Whiting] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: > 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both > [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some > would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what > occurred with /s/ and /z/). > [JM] > I disagree with Robert on this one. The evidence for establishing /th/ and > /dh/ as separate phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, > and /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs > to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the language). All phonemes > do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence equally impressive. > Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and unpredictability factors all > point toward them being separate phonemes. While the evidence for > separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as overwhelming as the evidence separating > /s/ and /z/, it is still enough to compel a separation on synchronic > grounds. [PR] Essentially, I would agree. > [PRp] > What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally > voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? > [JM] > Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This is not > appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the phonological > or morphophonological rules are still productive. [PR] With this I would fully agree. > [Robert Whiting] > Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot > be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but > also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they > can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' > [JM] > The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the assignment of > a PHONOLOGICAL rule. There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun > into a verb by voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, > e.g., 'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. Even the intervocalic voicing of > /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., path [th] and paths [dh], but path's > [th]. These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and > thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for these > pairs. Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it > in a theoretical sense. [PR] Again, I agree. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 27 00:49:01 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 19:49:01 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" To: Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2000 9:59 AM Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut > Dear Pat and anyone, > > I am truly grateful for the very explicitly critical reply to my mail, for > it gives me occasion to comment on some points that appear to have become > common heritage in the field of IE, even though the basis for them appears > slender or non-existing. I have a problem, however, with dragging named > authorities into this; do we have a right to bother third party just > because _we_ cannot come to an agreement? Still, the literature is there, > and for this very purpose. So, if our moderator permits, I'll react to > your posting in full. > On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, proto-language wrote: [PRp] >> To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >> change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >> phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >> support with some reservations: >> "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >> /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the >> chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >> formerly received a secondary pitch accent." [JER] > That is not what we find. It may be a popular guess about the unknowable, > but, as far as observations _can_ be made, they are very potently against > it. This is not ad hoc, it's rather contra hoc. I could understand that a > de-accented /e/ turned into /o/ if all unaccented /e/'s became /o/ (as I > think they did at one point), but the next step for all would be to go on > to zero (as I believe they in fact did). Surely, this cannot explain IE > "o-grade", except for the plain cases where lengthening has occurred, so > that we get, e.g., *-e':n vs. *'-o:n from accented *-e'n-s and unaccented > *'-en-s respectively. The rule is completely inadequate to account for an > alternation between accented o and zero (as in the perfect), nor does it > tell us why the pretonic -o- of the causative has not been lost. [PRp] >> Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended >> by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question >> like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, >> may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I >> understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive >> feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. [JER] > Agreed, and now it's happening, in both directions. Too bad that > suprasegmentals are not being conveyed on the list, but my "When will you > ever learn?" was meant with a ring of sarcasm, potentially against myself > - meaning "How long can I go on disagreeing with everybody?" As opinions > stand, it seems to be the facts that ought to give in: I am still waiting > for solid evidence favoring the most popular views about ablaut; when will > the IE languages ever learn how they are supposed to be? I, by no means, intend to not respond to the rest of Jens' interesting posting, but two matters first: 1) I would like to thank Jens for clarification of his remark, which I am sorry I misunderstood. 2) Before we get into details, I would like a clarification from Jens regarding his remarks above. It seems to me that he is lumping stress-accent and tone-accent together. If I understand Lehmann's argument properly, the essence of it is that they must be treated separately. Clarification? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Apr 24 20:52:11 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 22:52:11 +0200 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 1 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <008601bfaca7$1f2caa40$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] >[PR] >Essentially, I agree with you. >Rightly or wrongly, however, I favor basically Trask's definition with >qualifications: "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning"; >the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define >in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would >say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but >that 'ether/either' does. Maybe one of the broadest definitions of "meaning" states that elements said to have different "meanings" are used in different "contexts". Referential, situational, syntactic, you name it. Different inflections are used in different contexts, so they constitute minimal pairs and they are routinely used to pin down the phonemes of languages. I won't use sooth and soothe in the same contexts (or "frames" if you like), so this example is sufficient to establish the phonemic status of /dh/. If you don't like "meaning" here, insert "function". -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 25 01:04:07 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 20:04:07 -0500 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 2 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, April 21, 2000 4:38 AM [PRp] >> There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no >> language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ >> is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. >> This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious >> that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, >> is it not? [SG] > In diachronic terms, you are right, with the tiny (and picky) > amendment that the Balochi vowels are not derived from an "early > Sanskrit" source, since Balochi happens to be an Iranian language > rather than an Indic one. [PR] Oops! Should have said Indo-Iranian. But, equallly by friendly pickiness: why do you insist in Balochi when Baluchi is the normal English label? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From sarima at friesen.net Tue Apr 25 23:54:20 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:54:20 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <008601bfaca7$1f2caa40$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] At 05:07 PM 4/22/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define >in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would >say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but >that 'ether/either' does. I do not perceive the difference between sooth and soothe as *inflectional*, I perceive it as *derivational*. That is it is closer in effect to 'similar/similarity' than to 'hit/hits'. So, even if I accept you caveat, I would still treat 'sooth/soothe' as a minimal pair. (In fact I barely even perceive these two words as related)! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Apr 26 11:51:55 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] Hereinafter "#" is the schwa. (I am not using `@' here, as some emailers including mine have a fit of the sillies thinking that any word with `@' in is an email address.) Someone wrote:- >> However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >> and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >> Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >> minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >> and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >> However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >> phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >> It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >> historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >> There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >> 'uncle' /ata/, etc. Robert Whiting answered:- > Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this > phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic > realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal > pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, > but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to > explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning > environment that prevented it has been lost historically. ... An example of such a "silent phoneme" that some would invent, in a more familiar language, is the French "h aspire'" that prevents liaison in some French words, e.g. "le haricot" {l#ariko}, "les haricots2 {leariko}, where by the above analogy some would write {ariko} as {=ariko}. That this French so-called `=' phoneme is derived from a pronounced {h} sound, is merely old history (except in Normandy, where this {h} sound persists, or so I read once.) Likewise in standard moderm French, final closed {e} as in "je donnai", and final open {e} as in "je donnais", are now separate phonemes, whereas they were once likely allophones according to whether or not they were followed by a now-vanished final consonant. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 25 13:54:03 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:54:03 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000421070626.00afb730@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > At 09:38 AM 4/14/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >> On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: > >>> ... pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >>> Arthur, etc etc. >> And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of >> loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on >> native English phonology. > All of the listed words are old loans, and are fully Anglicized. > They are no longer perceived as "foreign" by the majority of speakers. > Thus they are indeed quite relevant to the *current* phonemic status > of the sounds they include. As I said, "foreign word" is a perceptual category and will vary from speaker to speaker. Indeed, most speakers won't even know what a loan word is. So we can write off the fact than intervocalic unvoiced [th] only appears in foreign words as coincidence. Can we then write off the regularity of sound change as coincidence too? I really do think that when there is an overwhelmingly regular pattern then it has to be acknowledged. But I agree that synchronic grammar has to be independent of historical developments. Speakers of a language learn its grammar. They very seldom learn the history of its grammar. >> Loan words do not necessarily follow >> the phonological rules of the borrowing language. > Only before they are nativized. Once nativized, they become relevant. Sure, but again, this is a perceptual category. But most speaker will realize that native words do not have unvoiced intevocalic [th]. >> In fact this >> is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it >> doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell >> that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > 'Padre' is still perceived as a Spanish word in English. Few even know > that 'authority' is NOT originally a native word. Sure, by people who know what Spanish (although it might also be from Italian or Portuguese) and know what a loan word is. Most in the military think that it is just what you call the chaplain. So let's consider 'patriot' instead. Few even know that 'patriot' is NOT originally a native word. It's been in the language longer than 'padre'. Or let's consider 'patron' or even 'pattern'. Perceptions of these as foreign or native words may vary considerably. Few may even see any connection between 'father' and 'padre', 'patriot', 'patron', and 'pattern'. But this doesn't change the fact that you can see which word is native and which are loans. >>> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc >> These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >> from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > And in all of your examples the two sounds are phonemically distinct. > That is /s/-/z/, and /f/-/v/ are good phoneme pairs, so this is not an > argument for denying /dh/ phonemic status. No they are morphophonemic alternations which are predictable by rule. If you have 'half' and 'halve' the rule tells you that 'half' is a substantive and 'halve' is a verb derived from it. If you have 'fife' and 'five', this is a phonemic distinction because the alternation of [f] and [v] tells you nothing about the meanings of the words except that they are different. > Also, I am not sure I would allow word derivation processes to use > NON-phonemic changes. The very fact that a sound difference can be > used in word derivation is, to my mind, evidence that the difference > is in fact phonemic. Again, this is a difference between synchronic rules and diachronic (historical) rules (changes). The synchronic derivational rule is not based on the historical change, but they both have the same result. Historically, the spirant in the infinitive was voiced because it was in a voiced environment when the change that voiced spirants in this environment took place. The derivational rule came about because the spirant was not devoiced when the attrition of the infinitive ending left it in word final position (in contrast to the final [th] of the ordinal numbers when it became word final). >> But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find >> something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible >> for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of >> as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the >> graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two >> sounds? > In the same way that Hebrew can get by with a writing system that does > not represent most vowels, and the same way Mycenian Greek could get > by with a syllabic writing system that failed to represent the > pronunciation of the language. Hebrew gets by without writing most vowels because the vowels are predictable from the environment. There's that word again -- predictable. Mycenaenean Greek got by because the writing system was used for extremely limited purposes and in administrative texts and inventories they drew little pictures to tell the reader what the word was so he didn't have to rely on the lousy phonological fit between the writing system and the language. > Answer: a native speaker has the vocabulary *memorized*, so they > *know* which words are pronounced which way, and read that *into* the > written word. No, the answer is that people learn to speak *before* they learn to read and write (in fact, some never learn to read and write at all, but this doesn't affect their ability as speakers). If there is a good fit between the writing system and the phonology of the langauge then the reader doesn't have to know anything about the vocabulary. When I was in Italy many years ago, I encountered someone who promised me that he would teach me to read, write, and speak Italian in 6 hours (1 hour a week for 6 weeks). He was as good as his word. At the end of that time, if I saw something written in Italian I could speak it flawlessly; if I heard something spoken I could write it easily. The only problem was that I couldn't understand a word of it. He taught me the relationship between the writing system and the sounds of the language. Someone (Italian) later handed me an invitation written in Italian and I read it to them, and then said, "but what does it mean?" The reply was, "but you read it perfectly, you can't possibly not know what it means." The same is not true of spoken and written English. Finnish children learn to write from dictation at the age of 7 or 8. English speaking children never do. Spelling in English is more of an art than a science. That is why the spelling bee is such a popular entertainment in English speaking countries. In Finnish or Italian what would be the point? Once you hear a word spoken properly you know how to spell it. Once you see a word written you know how to pronounce it. But the point is that speakers don't have the entire vocabulary *memorized*. They couldn't. How many words are there in an English dictionary? When they hear a word that they don't recognize they have to guess how to spell it. When they see a written word they don't recognize they have to guess how to pronounce it based on certain rules. If one knows a couple of rules one can always guess how to pronounce in English. That's why the distribution of sounds represented by is predictable and not arbitrary distinctions. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Wed Apr 26 00:02:48 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 17:02:48 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <007001bfac9c$7ac575e0$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 03:50 PM 4/22/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >[SF] >> Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the >> reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a >> rule. >[PR] >Generalizations are dandy but specifics are more helpful. >Examples? Try some of the other letters in this thread: for instance *to'mos/tomo's, which makes hash of just about every rule so far suggested. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Apr 28 00:30:17 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 12:30:17 +1200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>> Robert Whiting 04/14 6:38 PM >>> On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. [and I wrote] >> I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >> days without anyone questioning the original statement about >> complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >> which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >> pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >> examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >> find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >> Arthur, etc etc. [to which Robert Whiting replied] > And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of > loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on > native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow > the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this > is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it > doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell > that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I > was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps > I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone > knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a > language you should deal with words that are native to that > language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your > list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that > have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a > loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary > distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't > mentioned any of them. [to which I reply] I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English, and (ii) the reality that we are trying to get at is what is in speakers' heads. The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? Ross Clark From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Apr 25 09:05:44 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 03:05:44 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] [I, John McLaughlin, wrote] >> I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal >> pair. [Robert Whiting wrote] > I think that you truly have to consider both 'teeth' and 'teethe' as > morphophonemic variants of 'tooth'. This is not a productive rule of Modern English. You really must distinguish between diachrony and synchrony. I can no longer make a noun into a verb by adding Germanic *-jan to it and then change the vowel by umlaut. It hasn't been a productive rule for about a thousand years. Therefore they are NOT synchronic morphophonemic variants. [I wrote] >> Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of >> teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a >> voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction >> between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening >> of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the >> voicing). [Robert wrote] > Historically, this is nonsense. the lengthing of [i:] in 'teethe' > is a matter of stress. It is a matter of vowel quantity, not vowel > quality. Both 'teeth' and 'teethe' have [i:] and if the ending is > not stressed, both have the same vowel quality. The [i:] in both > 'teeth' and 'teethe' is the result of umlaut caused by the addition of > the plural ending (beginning with '-i') and the verbal suffix > (beginning with '-j'; exactly the same change that took place in > 'doom' - 'deem'), respectively. The fact that many speakers introduce > this additional distinction by stressing the ending of the verb > suggests that they do not consider the [th] - [dh] distinction to be > sufficient (i.e., they do not consider it phonemic). If 'tooth' had > not preserved its umlaut plural (i.e., if 'tooth' [+ plural] --> > *'tooths'), the question wouldn't arise. Sorry, Robert, but you're mixing up all kinds of diachronic/synchronic and phonetic/phonemic levels here. Ask any phonetician of English and he or she will gladly tell you that vowels in Modern English preceding a voiced consonant are measurably longer in duration that vowels preceding a voiceless consonant. I'm not at all talking about the "long/short" vowel distinctions of Old English, nor the diachronic processes that you believe are still operating in Modern English morphology and morphophonemics. Phonemically, both teeth and teethe have /i:/ (or /i/ if you prefer distinguishing between /i/ and /I/ rather than using length as the distinguishing feature), but phonetically, the /i:/ of 'teeth' is not as long as the /i:/ in 'teethe'. There's no debate about this among phoneticians. [I wrote] >> But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) >> English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, >> sooth/soothe, etc. [Robert wrote] > 'ether' [borrowed word] - 'either' [native word] > 'thigh' [non-pronoun] - 'thy' [pronoun] > 'wreath' [noun] - 'wreathe' [verb] > 'sooth' [noun] - 'soothe' [verb] Both here (and in your previous posts) you are marking way too many words in English as "borrowed". There are many words in English that are clearly marked as "borrowed" in the usage of most speakers (you mentioned 'padre', for example), but you are not at all careful in drawing the line between words that are perceived and used as borrowed terms and words that have been completely Anglicized. Should we mark 'copper', 'mint', 'mile' and 'church' as "borrowed"? Or how about 'seal (the animal)', 'auk', 'herring', and 'sea'? After a thousand years, borrowed words will have suffered one of two fates generally: 1) they will be so few in number that they will have been completely adapted to the borrowing language's phonology so that they are no longer identifiable as borrowed words, or 2) they will be so many in number that they will have changed the phonological structure of the borrowing language and might be identifiable to a linguist as an old borrowing, but to no native speaker. The latter is the case in English with much of our borrowed vocabulary. Take, for example, -(o)logy. It follows a Greek stress pattern. Originally, it was borrowed and only used with Greek stems. It soon was also used with Latin stems, but we can now say that -ology is completely part of the English "native" vocabulary because it is productive with any kind of stem--whether of Greek, Latin, English, or Hindustani origin. One needs only to listen to college students talk for any length of time to hear myriads of -ology words. It's a productive native suffix now. To do a phonological analysis of a language based on establishing an artificial distinction between ancient borrowings and so-called "native" words is weak, at best. If your only criteria for linking [th] and [dh] as allophones of a single phoneme in MODERN English is a morphophonemic rule that hasn't been productive for over a thousand years, and a distinction between very old borrowed words and "native" words, then you haven't proven the relationship. There is, indeed, a diachronic relationship between the two, and the two were, indeed, allophones of a single phoneme in Old English. But in Modern English, the two have split into two phonemes. [I wrote] >> However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >> and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >> Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >> minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >> and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >> However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >> phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >> It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >> historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >> There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >> 'uncle' /ata/, etc. [Robert wrote] > Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this > phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic > realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal > pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, > but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to > explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning > environment that prevented it has been lost historically. I'll tell > you what: Let's assume that English has a phoneme (let's call it [=] > just for consistency) that prevents an intervocalic dental spirant > from being voiced. Now let's insert this phoneme in a word like > 'ether' which shows an unvoiced intervocalic dental spirant /i:=ther/. > Good -- now we no longer have a minimal pair 'ether' - 'either'. Now > let's assume that English inserts this phoneme in all loanwords that > have an unvoiced dental spirant in a voiced environment. Voila -- a > phonetic environment that explains why loanwords have unvoiced > intervocalic [th]. Now all we need is a rule that says /=th/ --> > [dh] /__ m# and all intervocalic [th] in English is accounted for by > phonological rules. Hey, this is fun. Well, Robert, you've fallen into the trap that countless other non-Numicists have blundered into. But it is also illustrative of how different your morphophonemic evidence for lumping [th]/[dh] in English is from the Comanche problem at hand. Here's some very basic data to show that /=/ has a phonemic status. 1) Start with these noun stems which are representative of the entire body of nominal stems: [waa] 'cedar', [pyjy] 'duck', and [tyhyja] 'deer' 2) Now add the postposition /-pa/ 'on' to each of them: [waahpa] 'on the cedar', [pyjypa] 'on the duck', and [tyhyjava] 'on the deer'. Notice how the phonetic realization is different for each of these (remember that each of these words represents a class of nouns that operate exactly the same way). 3) Now add the postposition /-tu/ 'through' to each of them: [waahtu] 'through the cedar', [pyjytu] 'through the duck', and [tyhyjaru] 'through the deer'. Notice how the initial consonants of each of these suffixes changes in the same ways on the same stems. 4) Now incorporate each of these nouns on the verbal stem /-pa'i/ 'have': [waahpa'i] 'have a cedar', [pyjypa'i] 'have a duck', and [tyhyjava'i] 'have a deer' 5) Now compound each of these nouns with the nominal /puku/ 'pet': [waahpuku] 'pet cedar' (think bonzai), [pyjypuku] 'pet duck', and [tyhyjavuku] 'pet deer' By now you should realize that this is not some feature of the second element, but a feature of the stem that causes the initial consonant of the second element to be preaspirated, nonlenited, and lenited. Unlike the voicing of /th/ to [dh], it is fully productive in (at least preobsolescent) Comanche. There is something following each of these nominal stems which is neutralized in word final position. From Shoshoni evidence, we know that these "final features" are -C (an undifferentiated consonant that causes gemination in Shoshoni and preaspiration in Comanche), -n or -= (prenasalization in Shoshoni, a nonlenited stop in Comanche), and zero (allows lenition in both Shoshoni and Comanche). Now this does bring up an important point that I'm sure you'll agree with. There is not a clear boundary line that demarcates when a phoneme has split or when morphophonemic distinctions have ceased productivity or when any number of changes have finally and irreversibly taken place. Comanche is a very clear borderline case. The phonemic status of = (Shoshoni /n/) is not completely black or white. Such is also the case with the phonemic split between [th] and [dh]. (Now's the part where we disagree.) Because of the fully productive nature of the (morpho)phonemic final features in Comanche (including /=/), they must be set up as phonemes in the language, although admitting that their life expectancy is low. Because of the completely non-productive nature of the old morphophonemic processes which gave rise to [th] versus [dh], because [th] in [dh]'s environments has become firmly fixed by old loan words that have become nativized, and because the voicing environments for [dh] have been lost without the subsequent devoicing of [dh] to [th], then we must set up two phonemes in Modern English--/th/ and /dh/, although admitting that they are only recently distinguishable from one another. There was a whole lot more in Robert's last post, but it really just reiterates what has been said before. What got my goat in his first post was the comment that (not quoting directly), "No one doubts that Modern English [th] and [dh] represent allophones of the same phoneme." I doubt it, and quite seriously. I also realize that there are multiple levels of "phonemic analysis" as represented by points of view ranging from pure SPE (where much emphasis is placed on the "native"-"nonnative" distinction between vocabulary) to the more structuralist approaches. Perhaps when we respond to Pat and other non-professionals who occassionaly tug our chain, we can remember that professional linguists may all be walking in a westerly direction, but we're not necessarily arm-in-arm and keeping in step. :) John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Apr 26 06:50:28 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:20:28 +0530 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Robert Whiting's posting quoted below was in response to, and quoted from, a previous message from John McLaughlin dated 13 Apr 2000. I have added the proper attribution where needed. --rma ] On Saturday, 22 April, 2000 Robert Whiting wrote: Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there [ JMcL wrote:] >> [Robert Whiting] >> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to >> establish two sounds as separate phonemes. I am entering this debate somewhat late, but I do have strong opinions on it. In my view, the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where "either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. Of course, other pairs like thy/thigh, this'll/thistle etc. will reinforce this analysis. You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Imagine writing a description of the English sound system, say of the "General American" dialect. If you don't accept the phonemicity of /dh/, you will presumably provide a list of eight fricatives: /f/ /v/ /th/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ Next you will say that some of these come in voiceless/voiced pairs: /f/ - /v/, /s/ - /z/ and /sh/ - /zh/. One (/h/) is always voiceless. Finally, there is a curious phoneme /th/, which is voiceless initially (except in function words) and in word-final position in nouns (bath) and adjectives (uncouth), but voiced between vowels (except when not), after consonants (further), and in word-final position in verbs (bathe). Words of foreign origin (as if native speakers cared) would have their own rules (Athens, anthem). No doubt other sub-rules could be added, ad infinitum. Now why would this analysis be superior to one that said that English had nine fricatives (/f/ /v/ /th/ /dh/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ )? Here you need no distributional rules, just a specification of the articulation of each phoneme: voiceless labiodental fricative etc. [snip] > No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that either > requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate phonemes. > I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and how the evidence > proves it one way or the other. [ JMcL wrote:] >> The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is >> no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes >> (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the >> same footing as other phonemes in the language). > I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or /oj/ > occur only in certain classes of words or only as morphophonemic > alternants? Show me that in all the words where /zh/ occurs that /zh/ > limits or restricts the meanings that it can have and I will grant you > the point. It is said that /ng/ only occurs in word final position, > but even this is not true (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be > difficult to establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: > places where these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be > predicted by rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the > point. [GS] Once you accept nonphonetic conditioning factors, there is no end to the elimination of phonemes from a system. Take two of your examples above: /ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why not?) in final position after /n/, and before the derivative suffix -er (as in "singer"), although not before the comparative -er (as in "longer"). There remain some exceptions, like the name of my favourite Canadian city (Vancouver is pronounced /vaenku:v at r/ by locals), but this is clearly a loanword, or (maybe) two morphemes: Van Couver. /zh/ - who needs it? Using the logic of reductionism, we shall elaborate a set of rules to account for this sound: (1) It is an allophone of the phoneme /j/, occurring in loanwords from French (genre, garage, mirage). The phoneme /j/ in native words like 'edge' /ej/ remains [j], whereas this pronunciation does not occur in loanwords. Where it does, one may always set up a new word category: loanwords that have been fully assimilated to the sound structure of English. This will take care of troublesome words like jet, gene and magenta. (2) In words like azure, seisure and invasion, /zh/ is derived from the sequence of phonemes z + y. (/azyu:r/, /si:zy at r/ and /inveyzy at n/). Come to think of it, didn't Chomsky and Halle analyze English along these lines, to get back at those dreadful structuralists of the 50's? With sufficient ingenuity, I am sure we can come up with rules to eliminate other phonemes from English: /v/ and /@r/ (bird, fern, word) come immediately to mind. My main point, I hope readers realize, is that this kind of analysis is not very helpful. A simple description of the phonemic structure of a language should account for all differences that are potentially distinctive, irrespective of the morphology, semantics or etymological provenance of the words in question. It is a noteworthy fact that there tend to be correlations between certain phonemes and certain grammatical and semantic criteria. In English, /dh/ starts many function words and /th/ never does - so what? The phoneme /h/ (or the cluster /hw/, depending on the dialect) starts many interrogatives (where, which, what, when) while /k/ never does - is this a reason to bunch them together under one phoneme? [snip] [ JMcL wrote:] >> [Me] >> The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >> assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. > Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you saying that > allophones automatically become separate phonemes when the > phonological conditioning environment that maintains their allophonic > identity is lost? And that they are phonemes even if they never > contrast in an environment that can't be predicted, so long as the > basis for predicting the environment is not phonological? [GS] Yes, that's how it should be. Once the conditioning factor is lost, we have separate phonemes. German (+Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) umlauts, Southern British /e@/ (bare, care) and French nasal vowels come to mind as examples. You can probably invent a series of complex rules to eliminate these from the inventories of phonemes, explain the exceptions as loanwords, analogies or whatever, but what would be the purpose of this? > Now if this is what you believe, I am not saying that it is wrong. It > is more a matter of how one sees the interaction of the various parts > of language. If the determination of phonemes is an entirely > phonological process, then it is quite correct. But if other areas > or language can affect phonology, then it is not necessarily so. > Again, it is a question of how much one area of language can affect > the others. A matter of where you draw your lines and how you make > your definitions. [snip] > I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' so > it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and [pavi] > aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words are both > native in Comanche). 'Thigh' - 'thy' is just a historical accident. > You say that synchronicity demands that [th] and [dh] be separate > phonemes and that non-productive forms cannot be used for synchronic > phonemicization and then you give me evidence based on loanwords and > obsolete forms. Not good enough. To use someone else's analysis of Comanche as supporting evidence for your analysis of English is not very convincing. If I analyzed Comanche, I would probably accept the p/v contrast as phonemic, even if the contrast existed only intervocally. I don't know Comanche, and I would be interested to hear how it borrows words from English that begin with p- and v-, respectively. Loans from Spanish are of lesser value, as /v/ does not exist in that language. It is quite common in language change for certain new phonemes to exist at first only in specific environments. Subsequently, the new phoneme is introduced into other environments by borrowing (from other languages or from other dialects of the same language) or by processes other than the one that gave rise to the new phoneme in the first place. Examples: 1. /v/, /z/, and /j/ in English. These phonemes arose from internal /f/, /s/ and /g > y/ in Old English under certain conditions (live, cheese, hedge), and they were introduced initially later on in loanwords (very, zero, jet) and from dialects (vat, vixen). 2. /b/, /d/ and /g/ in my native Hungarian. These phonemes are the natural development of the Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) internal clusters /-mp-/, /-nt-/ and /-nk-/, respectively. On the other hand, they should not exist initially, as there is no regular phonetic change that could produce them from PFU etyma. Yet Hungarian is full of words beginning with voiced stops: they are loanwords from Turkic, Slavic etc., and there are even a few words of FU origin where initial *p- and *t- changed into *b- and *d- ("sporadic sound change"). There exist as well curious cases where an allophone acquires phonemic status ONLY because of the introduction of loanwords into a language. I am thinking of Japanese, where the phoneme /h/ is pronounced as the voiceless bilabial fricative (normally denoted as the Greek letter phi, but let's write it [ph] here) before the vowel /u/ (the Hepburn transliteration is used for the gloss, followed by a phonemic and phonetic transcription): Fujimori /huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori], fune /hune/ 'boat' is [phune]. Nowadays, loanwords from English are introducing [ph] into environments other than pre-/u/, e.g. ftku [pho:ku] 'fork', fairu [phairu] 'file'. According to my thinking, a new phoneme is being born in Japanese: the next generation of speakers will not necessarily know that these are "loanwords", so any phonetic rule based on their being loanwords will be purely ad-hoc: the only reason for labelling some words as loanwords will be in order to account for the presence of "unusual" occurrences of sounds like [ph] not before /u/, [sh] before /e/ etc. It is better, IMHO, to allow for the addition of new phonemes into the structure. Best wishes to all, Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail_com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Apr 26 12:02:58 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 15:02:58 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <006201bfac94$4639e5c0$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Patrick Ryan:] > It suffices that pairs like /hwer/ ('where') and /wer/ ('wear') exist. But, > I believe we must have at least *one* minimal pair for a phoneme to be > established. There are two mistakes here: 1. One minimal pair, such as above, does not establish phonemes - it establishes an opposition in a non-contrastive environment. A phoneme is the sum of its oppisitons: what makes something a phoneme is that it is in opposition to -all- the other phonemes. You can establish phonemes only in the context of the whole phonological system. To take an example: Finnish has the consonant phonemes /ptksvjlrmn/ (plus /?d/ in some dialects and idiolects, disregarded here). Now, the following is a minimal pair: Finn. kala 'fish' vs. pala 'piece' But pointing this out does not establish phonemes /p/ and /k/ for Finnish. It does not show that /k/ is a phoneme distinct from /t/, /s/, /v/ etc. You would have to show that -all- the phonemes contrast with each other. In order to establish /p/ as a phoneme, you'd have to point out e.g. the following minimal pairs / series: puu 'tree' vs. luu 'bone' vs. kuu 'moon' vs. muu 'else' vs. suu 'mouth' palo 'burning' vs. talo 'house' vs. valo 'light' vs. salo 'woodland' vs. jalo 'noble' pata 'pot' vs. rata 'track' vs. nata 'snot' You have established the Finnish phonemes only when you have shown that every one of them is in opposition with every other. It is a different thing to demonstrate phonemic contrast using a minimal pair and establish a phoneme - the latter requires multiple minimal pairs (if demonstrated through minimal pairs, see below). 2. It must be once again stressed that for many languages it is impossible to establish all the contrasts using minimal pairs - this is precisely the case with English /sh/ vs. /zh/, which was discussed earlier. The phonemes contrast with each other even though there are no minimal pairs, because their distribution cannot be accounted for with a rule. I.e., they show contrast in non-contrastive environments (vicious vs. vision etc.). Regards, Ante Aikio From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 25 12:37:51 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:37:51 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: > From: "petegray" > Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 17:47:00 +0100 > Subject: Re: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) > A thought: If an English speaker is presented with a new word pronounced > with /V:dh/ at the end, does she or he hear it as a verb? And would he or > she make the similar form ending /Vth/ into the corresponding noun? > Apart from wild guesses, does anyone happen to know of any evidence? Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include "hath", "doth"), and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in some dialects). Max ____________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B. Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk ____________________________________________________________ From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:36:04 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:36:04 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <009b01bfac6c$6ac36920$bac601d5@xpoxkjlf>; from "petegray" at Apr 21, 100 8:06 Message-ID: > Jens said: >> I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves ... A voiced value of >> /H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; > Steady on! This word is far from clear, and is, I believe, the only > evidence for voicing in H3. Can we really construct our theories on one > isolated unclear word? The two other examples of H3-based voicing in PIE are 1) proto-Celtic word *abon 'river' < PIE *H2ep-H3on ~ 'that, which has the running water' (where *H3on is a "grundsprachliches Posessivsuffix") 2) notoriously known greek _ogdoos_ '8th' < PIE (H)ok^tH3u-H2o-s (reconstruction according to Rix GrGr, 172) The second example is even more suspicious than the first, because in greek, especially in the system of numerals there're so many voicings, which are hard to account for, cf. '7th' hebdomos. However, i do believe, too, that in the terms of distinctive features H3 should be characterized as [+voiced], (as well as [+labialized]), given voice was distinctive for PIE at all :-), which is a different issue. Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:36:23 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:36:23 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: ; from "Herb Stahlke" at Apr 14, 100 4:20 Message-ID: > Lehmann, in his Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, p. 107, > attributes the term to a Semiticist, Hermann Moeller, in 1879. He mentions > only a note and does not give a citation. > Herb Stahlke To be precise: H. Moeller. 1880. "Zur Conjugation. KunZa und das t-preteritum. Excurs: Die Entstehung des o" In: Beitraege zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Bd. 7. S. 492, Anm.2 "wahrscheinlich gutturale von der art der semitischen, A = alef, der tonlose gutturale verschlusslaut und E wahrscheinlich der entsprechende toenende verschlusslaut". (In 1917 Moeller adopted the idea of H. Sweet, which dates back to the same 1880, that E might have been a "glottal thrill") It's worth being noted that the two most widespread approaches towards the determination of the phonetic realisation of Hs both go back as far as 1880: the "semitic" variant (glottal stop, pharyngeal and the labialized pharyngeal), for which see e.g. Keiler, Hamp and Beekes, and which is what Moeller advocated for. But in his earlier article dated the same 1880 Moeller put forth the term "kehlkopsspirans". It is of interest, that different scholars have been referring to the facts of Arabic and, generally, semitic languages to witness the developments, which in IE studies are attributed to laryngeals. But even in Arabic the effects produced by the neighbouring fricatives (of the type Jens Rasmussen so lucidly was writing about) are nearly the same as those of neighbouring ayn, ghayn or hamsa. (I have to bring my disclaimers beforehand, my knowledge of Arabic is that of the beginner, and my data of the subject is secondary) Cf. before ayn (`) Impf. yad.a'u 'he lays' from wad.a`a, while it is /i/ that is required by the "naw`-un", see yajlisu from jalasa. But the same case is yad_bah.u from d_abah.a in the proximity of /h./ Or in the akkadian language: 'dust' is epiru, while in hebrew the counterpart is `a:fa:r (a>e after ayn); but 'father-in-law' is emu in akkadian, while in hebrew it is h.am. In akkadian 'take!' is akhuz, while **ukhuz would be expected. These examples may be multiplied; on the other hand, some of them may not stand a severe critisism of an experienced specialist in afrasian languages; still, it can be proved, that fricatives in semitic languages cause the same sound changes as sounds of glottal articulation do. And that gives a point to them. On the other hand, it is sometimes referred to, that afrasian "laryngeals" could be vocalised (at a certain stage of their history). And, generally, it seems more probable for the sounds of an "unstable laryngeal articulation" to be vocalised. But fricatives can be syllabic, too, e.g. in berber languages. A second point. (Though for the problem of syllabic Hs anaptyxis is a plausible decision, too). Thus, to the best of my knowledge and understanding, the model based on the "semitic laryngeals" has no real advantage over the system of fricatives; while there's a couple of pieces of evidence more, which force the researcher to the "fricative"-conclusion. Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev P.S. The funny thing is that greek o-mikron-letter has as its source the phoenician grapheme, which designated exactly ayn! I am not sure, may be it was W.Allen, who first paid attention to that. From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:38:15 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:38:15 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >So, my current "best guess" for the laryngeals is something like yours, >/x', x, x^w/, or /h, x, x^w/. (With /x/ being a *back* fricative, and /x'/ >or /h/ being less far back). As the last but not least argument for fricative nature of PIE laryngeals it is commonly claimed that, being /x/s, laryngeals would pattern the three rows of tectals (if these are in fact three :-> ); and that is why a quality of a palatized counterpart of H2 is assigned to H1. I take the liberty to expound some views on this tangled topic. On the one hand, if the system is /x', x, x^w/ this would account for the fact that H2 is the most widespread -- it is thus the least marked, as to the set of its distinctive features. But in the course of the development of the laryngeal theory H1 came to be held for the least marked of the three, as it causes no colouring at all. And then the system /h, x, x^w/ seems better: then the phonemic status of H1 as the least marked is not violated (the putative parallelism to tectals could be omitted, being itself an obscure matter). But -- the decision, that H1 doesn't colour an adjacent vowel largely (if not wholly) depends on the H2O problem. And if one believes that /o/ resisted the colouring by adjacent H2, it should then resist being colouring by H1, too. (And discussing H3o is needless). Then the conclusion is that /o/ is not coloured by any of the laryngeals. And as the cardinal /a/ is extremely rare and doesn't influence this logics much, since in the examples, where it is present, it doesn't neighbour any of the Hs. And then it's impossible to say, that H1 doesn't produce ANY colouring-effect: if within the system of PIE this sound could theoretically affect 2 vowels, and we know, that one of these resisted being affected, and we do not know for sure, if what we write as /e/ was indeed [e] -- claiming that H1 makes no colouring is impossible, isn't it? And then there's no need to account for its "weakness" by assigning to this phoneme the "weakest" phonetic realisation [h]. Then /x', x, x^w/ is, finally, the one set, i prefer. As to my position, I personally do believe, that H2o resulted in o; i guess, there're some 12 examples, like orkh'eomai - arkh'os, 'onkos - ank'ule:, 'ago: - 'ogmos, 'akros - okr'is... And i do believe that the traditional PIE /e/ could have been something like [a[, /o/ being [@], a kind of a Pulleblankianism. Any comments? Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 25 12:50:27 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:50:27 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: -- Begin original message -- > From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen > Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 18:00:15 +0200 (MET DST) [snip] > Even so, I cannot dismiss your suggestion of phonetic variation - that > could even have been there from the start, meaning that [h] may be just > one of the manifestations of /H1/, which would still leave room for [x^] > being another. I do not believe phonetic typology has reached a point > enabling it to exclude any such thing. And incidentally, the Greek > reflexes of CRH1C with /-Re:-/ are easier to udnerstand from [x^] than > from [h], since the latter would simply add voicelessness, but not > redirect the articulation to any other location than where the sonants are > themselves - and they all produce [a] when given an undisturbed course. Variation along these lines, whether allophonic or socially condiditoned (or "free") seems very plausible. Spanish /x/ is [x] in many dialects, [h] in others. In Welsh, [x], [X] (uvular) [h] (and zero) are variants of the same phoneme. In Old English [h] and [x] may have been allophones of the same phoneme. In the Spanish and OE case, [x] > [h] seems to be involved, but in the Welsh case it's more complicated, since one source of [h] is */s/. Max From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 02:22:12 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 18:22:12 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: >There is one minimal pair that works for most of my British students: > 'assure' / 'azure' >But this doesn't work at all in my American accent, since I stress >'azure' on the first syllable -- a pronunciation that invokes giggles >or scowls from my students. Also, in my variant of American, I actually use a different vowel in the last syllable. (Syllabic-r in the first, a short 'oo' sound in the second). >Clearly, the choice of [esh] or [ezh] cannot be governed by rule. >In fact, there is probably no more economical way to account for >the distribution of these two sounds than to give lists of the >words containing them. This observation is enough to establish >thet they must be distinct phonemes -- even if we have no minimal >pairs. And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). >> [PR] >> Could you name a "best text on phonology", and cite a relevant definition of >> phoneme from it? >I suggest the following: >Francis Katamba (1989), An Introduction to Phonology, London: Longman. >pp. 22-23. Thanks. My library is in such disarray I just couldn't find the right books. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 03:06:08 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:06:08 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <015101bf99d0$3513ca80$749f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:42 PM 3/29/00 +0000, proto-language wrote: >Dear Larry and IEists: >[PR] >Now I am really confused. I would have thought that /h/ could be established >by many minimal pairs like [her] / [per] and /ng/ by many minimal pairs like >[bang] / [ban], along the lines of your dictionary's: "The existence of such >a pair demonstrates conclusively that the two segments which are different >must belong to two different phonemes." But none of those minimal pairs requires that /h/ and /ng/ belong to different phonemes. After all, there are allophones for which the rule really is based on initial versus final position. For instance, in High German, the allophone of /d/ at the end of a word is voiceless. Minimal pairs only establish the *particular* sounds involved as distinct. They do not resolve the issue with regards to other sound pairs. [PR] >So what other condition is "*sufficient*" to establish a phonemicity? I think you mean 'necessary', since a minimal pair *is* sufficient (by itself it establishes the two sounds which distinguish the two words as distinct phonemes). It is, however not *necessary*, since /h/ and /ng/ are treated as distinct phonemes even in the absence of a minimal pair demonstrating their distinction. I am not sure there *is* any single necessary condition. [PR] >Ah, a diplomatic answer. >Well, a rule that has been proposed to account for IE /o/ is that it results >when the (tonal-/stress) accent of an /e/ is shifted to another syllable. Now, the problems with this are various. First, the rules for allophones must refer to *synchronic* features. A shifted accent is no longer present as a conditioning feature. (However, a rule referring to the position of a syllable *relative* to an accent is allowable, as in the rule on Proto-Germanic reflexes of PIE obstruents). So, by its very form, postulating the *removal* of a conditioning factor, this model requires the *reconstructed* PIE *o to be a phoneme. Second, in many cases the "accent shift" is postulated *solely* on the grounds of the existence of /o/. This is circular reasoning. Internal reconstruction can only take you so far! Finally, there are a number of cases of reconstructed PIE /o/ for which an accent shift is dubious, at the very least. (Many of these are "grammatical" /o/s, which are only possible if it is already a phoneme). >Additionally of interest is that no IE verbal root seems to contain /o/. That goes to show it was a relatively recent acquisition as a phoneme, not that it was not one. I do agree, PIE *o must be recently generated, probably from more than one source. >So, applying your insight, is IE /o/ a phoneme or not? In PIE proper, yes, it is. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Apr 1 03:17:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in >English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless >claim that there has been a phomemic split similar to what occurred with >/s/ and /z/). This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words >and pronouns, [th] otherwise. Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. One approach one can take in living languages is to check the speaker's awareness of the distinction. Often an untrained speaker is unaware of true allophonic distinctions. For instance, the aspiration/non-aspiration of voiceless stops in English is not generally even noticed by most speakers. It usually has to be demonstrated to them before they can recognize it. On the other hand, most English speakers I know of seem to be quite aware of the /th/ vs. /dh/ distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 2 14:21:13 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 17:21:13 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Mar, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: >Since, for example, some of the innovations that define >Proto-Germanic seem to be quite recent -- Iron Age, judging by >the development of the Celtic loanwords for things like iron >technology and some social terminology like "king" or "servant" >-- what would be the distinction between pre-proto-Germanic and >pre-Balto-Slavic in, say, 1500 or 2000 BCE? >Not a question that can be settled, of course, but interesting to >contemplate. (My own guess would be "not much".) Solving the distinctions between Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic seems to be one of the major problems of IE classification. As I remember the discussions of the UPenn tree, this is where it had the most problems determining the branching. Not to mention the question of whether there actually was a Balto-Slavic unity or not. The reason for this, I think, lies in the fact that there has been extensive reconvergence among the early forms of these stocks so that the original branchings have been obscured. There is fairly conclusive evidence that at one point there was a circum-Baltic sprachbund that included Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Balto-Finnic. Reconvergence under the effects of the sprachbund is a great little blurrer of earlier distinctions. >>but after this change this branch seems to have become very >>conservative (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic). >-- here I would disagree, to a certain extent. Baltic and >Slavic yes; but Indo-Iranian, no. After all, Sanskrit appears >conservative precisely because the version we have was fossilized >as a "learned" and liturgical language, rather like Latin. Its >forms date from a very early period, analagous to that of our >Mycenaean and Hittite records. Yes, I grant you this. In fact (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic) almost looks like a "which language doesn't belong here?" question. Sanskrit looks archaic because, well, it's archaic -- as you say, it is at least 3000 years closer to PIE than modern Lithuanian is. >>(actually, one of the other Baltic languages, like Old Prussian >>or Curonian, may have been even more conservative, but since >>little or nothing of them survive it is not possible to say). >-- very true; entropy strikes again. On the other hand, if you >run Latvian backward, you get a proto-language very much like >Lithuanian! Plus, of course, we know that much of the >territory now occupied by Latvian was originally Uralic. Yes, and it would seem that Baltic (or one of its previous manifestations) has pretty much always been in contact with Uralic. First we have the evidence of contact between PIE and PU, then there are the Old Iranian loans at the PFU level, but there are also Slavic loans in all the FU languages (but not, apparently, inherited from the proto-language, and who can really tell the difference between Slavic and Baltic at this stage). Then there are the sprachbund effects leading right down to the present day when Baltic and Balto-Finnic are still in contact. >>But again (or still) this doesn't say anything specific about >>where they started out geographically except that Baltic was >>always in close proximity to Slavic. >-- not definitively, no. >However, at the earliest historic attestation, Baltic was >directly north of Slavic and Slavic extended from east of the >Vistula into the forest-steppe of the Ukraine. The relationship >of Baltic and Slavic and the lack of identifiable substrata other >than some influence from Uralic _and_ the presence of Baltic >river-names in the eastern and northeastern areas later colonized >by Slavic (Russian and Beorussian particularly) would argue that >they had occupied both this relative position _and_ their >respective actual territories for a very, very long time. I grant you all this, but note that this argument does not make use of linguistic conservatism, which, I think, is as it should be. It is quite possible that Baltic is very conservative in some features and that it may very well have been near the IE homeland, but I don't think that this is a cause and effect relationship. I would be willing to give more weight to the persistent connection with Uralic as an indication of not having moved much than to linguistic conservatism. >>But the presence of more archaic lexical items and fewer obvious >>substrate borrowings could equally well be a result of the >>refusal of the language to accept loans as of its still being in >>its original home. >-- quite true; we know, for example, that Anglo-Saxon ended up in >England due to migration and supplanted a Brythonic-Celtic >language (and Latin), but you couldn't prove it by linguistics >alone. 11th-century Anglo-Saxon, the Wessex dialect >specifically, was still an extremely ordinary West Germanic >language and probably fully mutually comprehensible with its near >kin in the Low Countries. It was still marginally mutually >comprehensible with Scandinavian, for that matter. And there >were very few Celtic loan-words -- about 12, if I remember >correctly. But this is more or less typical of substratum influence on superstratum languages. Using Amerind influence on English as an example, words taken into the superstratum will typically be toponyms (Mississippi, Mississinewa, Missouri) or words for local flora (squash) and fauna (woodchuck, chipmunk) or local implements (moccasin, tomahawk, wampum, wigwam) or institutions (powwow) that the superstratum language lacks. Other words will tend to be used pejoratively or for comic effect (papoose, squaw, mugwump). If the superstratum language came from a similar area (as in the case of Anglo-Saxon) so that the flora and fauna are familiar, there is not likely to be new words coming into the language in this area, and if the superstratum language preferred to rename the topological features in its own language or calque or folk etymologize these names from the old language, there would not be many here either (but note the persistence of Latin-based place names in England into modern English). And so on through the list. >So the archaism and lack of non-IE loanwords in the Baltic >languages _by itself_ would not be a firm indication of >anything, as you say. However, when taken in _combination_ with >other factors, we're in somewhat different territory. Agreed that the more evidence that points in the same direction, the more likely that direction is to be the correct one. But likely still doesn't mean definitely so it is still a purely hypothetical solution. But it is still useful to be able to disprove a theory piecemeal, because these potential disproofs provide falsifiability for the parts of the theory. And if the parts of the theory can't be falsified when there is a test for falsification available, then the entire theory gains in strength. In essence, it makes the theory scientific even if the theory as a whole has no test for falsification. So there is nothing wrong with saying that while the individual pieces of a theory could all be explained differently, doing so stretches the limits of both coincidence and credulity and therefore the simpler explanation provided by the theory is more likely to be correct. This is enumerative induction as opposed to eliminative induction. A while back we had a lengthy discussion on the validity of the laryngeal theory. The opponent of the theory claimed that all the effects of the laryngeal theory could be accounted for by 16 or 17 different rules operating in various places. When it was pointed out to him that the statistical probability of this happening was virtually nil, he eventually accepted the laryngeal theory as correct in its essentials. (Of course, we're still arguing about the number of laryngeals and their values, but that is a different matter.) >Eg., Anglo-Saxon/Old English is geographically peripheral to the >main mass of the Germanic languages, with salt water in between, >and there -are- a number of Celtic place-names in its territory, >increasing in number as you move west. Even if one knew nothing >about the history prior to 1000 CE, you'd still have enough for >an informed guess that Anglo-Saxon was a fairly recent offshoot >of the main Germanic zone. (And, taking in similar evidence from >the Continent, that Germanic in general had been expanding at the >expense of Celtic and Romance.) And at the expense of Slavic too, but that also is a different matter. >>English, on the other hand, just gobbles up loanwords and >>neologisms regardless of whether they violate English >>phonotactics or not (e.g., aardvark, gnu, syzygy). This is >>simply not a function of how close these respective languages >>are to their original homelands. >-- true; although, of course, we know that German is much closer >geographically to the proto-Germanic _urheimat_. But not *in* the Germanic Urheimat. There is still not a cause and effect relationship. If the Goths came from Gotland, then Swedish is closest to the Germanic Urheimat. And modern Swedish has about as many loanwords as modern English does. But because most of these loans come from Low German they are not as noticeable as the predominantly Latin/French loans in English so the point is not often raised. >Interestingly enough, English only became exceptionally open to >loan-words after the Norman Conquest. Prior to that, Old English >was notably resistant to foreign lexical influence. No, it is only after the Norman Conquest that the loans become easily noticeable. There are a lot of loans from Scandinavian in English that predate the Norman Conquest that most native speakers don't even recognize as loans. This is the effect of adstratum borrowing from a closely cognate language (in the case of Scandinavian and Old English, practically a matter of dialect borrowing) and is very similar to the effects of Swedish borrowings from Low German. In adstratum borrowing, very common, everyday words can be borrowed for quite a number of reasons. Among the most common of these is greater differentiation or specialization in meaning. There are thus quite a number of Scandinavian borrowings in which both the inherited word and the borrowed word still exist but are specialized in different uses. For example: Native English Scandinavian shirt skirt shuttle skittle shoe sky (both originally meant 'covering') 'em them yard garden rear raise whole hale Unless one has been specifically taught that the Scandinavian forms are borrowings, one is not likely to recognize them as such (with the exception of those that begin with sk- since it is fairly obvious that any word that begins thus in English is a loan [or a dialectal form]), in contrast to French borrowings like 'facade' 'chalet' or 'chandelier' which jump out as loanwords from their spelling and pronunciation. >>If we didn't have a historical record of the situation, the >>argument of conservatism plus lack of substratum influence could, >>other things being equal, be used to claim that Iceland is the >>original Scandinavian homeland. >-- good point. >Although there, we know that there was no prior population -- and >my original argument was that Baltic probably entered an area not >far away from the _urheimat_ ... _and_ one which was very thinly >populated. (What's now the eastern part of the Baltic was late >being neolithicized, if memory serves me correctly.) Yes, knowing what happened makes it easier to do reconstructions. But the fact that we know that Icelandic had no substratum influence and we suspect that Baltic didn't have much, doesn't say anything about how far away from their original homelands they are. If it did, your hypothesis would be in real trouble, because if Icelandic has no substratum influence and is conservative and is a long way from its homeland, then if Baltic also has no substratum influence and is conservative, then it should also be a long way from its homeland. These are just not one cause - one effect relationships. If one effect can have many causes, then lack of the effect does not say which cause is responsible. Lack of substratum influence can be the result of a lack of a substratum or of a refusal to be influenced. As an example consider the following: There is no evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate coverup. This implies: a) Nixon was not involved in the Watergate coverup; b) all evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate coverup has been suppressed or destroyed. Which is true? >>Negative evidence cannot be used to construct specific >>scenarios. Negative evidence only means that there is no >>evidence. >-- it's not demonstrative, as positive evidence is. However, I >think it can be legitimately used _in conjunction_ with other >supporting evidence to say that one of a number of alternative >explanations is more likely than another. Yes, negative evidence is not completely worthless, but it can only lead to negative conclusions which may allow you to eliminate some of the potential causes. It is particularly useful if there is a reciprocal one effect - one cause relationship. If there is no smoke without fire AND no fire without smoke, then no smoke means no fire. But it still doesn't tell you why there is no fire. But if it is possible to have a fire without smoke, then no smoke just means no smoke. In this case, smoke means fire, but no smoke doesn't necessarily mean no fire. >As Holmes said, the crucial thing was what the dog did in the >night. When Watson pointed out that the dog had done nothing in >the night, he replied: "Exactly." Well, close enough. But the point of this is not so much that the dog didn't bark, but what it would have taken to make the dog bark. If the dog never barked at anything, then the fact that the dog did not bark in the night would not have been interesting at all. Since the dog didn't bark, either there was no dog or nothing happened to make the dog bark. Now if the dog barks at strangers or at rabbits but not at people that it knows, then if some unaccountable act is performed in the night and the dog doesn't bark (and we know that there was a dog) that eliminates strangers (and rabbits) as having performed the act. But it still doesn't tell which non-stranger/non-rabbit did perform the act. This is why negative hypotheses are generally scientific (falsifiable) while the opposing positive ones are not. "There is no Santa Claus" is a scientific theory because it can be falsified by producing the one and only true Santa Claus. "There is a Santa Claus" is not a scientific theory because it cannot be falsified. It can only be disputed with negative evidence. Of course, scientific doesn't mean necessarily true, it just refers to the way in which it can be investigated. So there is nothing wrong with believing in Santa Claus. It just means that no one can prove that you are wrong if you do. And if you are sure that all the evidence has been destroyed, this can be a very comfortable position to be in. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sat Apr 1 17:42:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 17:42:00 GMT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Message-ID: It's indeed crucial: What really are 'certain shared innovations'? They are never 'certain'. Even with perfect sound correspondences these may be just chance. They of cource then would have a high probability of not being just chance. >the UPenn tree being discussed was entirely built on (in form at least) >a narrowed sample of 'data' .. I again must insist: We do not have the data for the UPenn tree; and therefore we cannot discuss anything! Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 1 14:59:48 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 16:59:48 +0200 Subject: Tonal and stress accents In-Reply-To: <005c01bf970e$4afe9d80$ba4601d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, petegray wrote: > Jens said: >> There was stress before PIE, and stress >> after PIE, why not _in_ PIE? To this Peter replied: > I find this argument more persuasive than your earlier ones, Jens, but we > are still left with the evidence of Greek, which does not appear to have had > a stress accent until well after the classical period. Sanskrit accent is > also described as pitch, but I know the details less well, and cannot argue > that stress is precluded by the evidence, the way I would wish to for Greek. > I know that the Sanskrit grammarians use only pitch terms, not stress, and > that there is no sign of the stress effects on adjacent syllables that we > would expect to find with a stress accent. > If these two languages did indeed have no stress accent, then your logic > seems shakier - it is not necessarily true that the PIE stress accent > continued unabated from the earliest time. Thank you, I see your point very well, Peter, but I still find it hard to believe that stress (of the time when zero-grades were born) changed into high pitch (as assumed for PIE), and that high pitch later changed back into stress everywhere it got a chance. Could the reason why we don't see syllable weakenings caused by the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (etc.) not simply be that these effects had already happened, so that we are looking at the results? Latin has a lot of weakenings caused by the ealier initial stress, but none yet caused by the historical accent on the penult or antepenult; still, all Romance languages testify to this accent and enough have strong reductions caused by it to prove that it existed already in their common prestage. I don't know of any weakenings caused by the fixed stress of Polish or Czech, nor Finnish for that matter. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if there _were_ degrees of duration or aperture ("sonority") that would show in fine measurings. Do stress accents have to be accompanied by _instant_ alternations of phonemic proportions? Can't changes begin subphonemically and go ignored for long periods? - I agree that we cannot dismiss high pitch for the PIE accent syllable, but only then accompanied with some prominence of the kind we call stress, for that can be reconstructed too. Actually, there are a few accentrelated phonological changes in Greek. Most notably, the sequence CRHC comes out different dependent on the position of the accent. Born without proper vowels, the sequence is normally unaccented, and so gives Gk. CRe:C/CRa:C/CRo:C (with H1, H2, H3 respectively), but if the accent is shifted onto the syllabified sonant to mark a change of part of speech, the result is CaRaC in the case of H2 (less well known for the other laryngeals), cf. pairs like vb.adj. kma:to's (Att. kme:to's) 'worn out' : subst. ka'matos 'fatigue'; thna:to's (Att. -e:-) 'dead' : sbst. tha'natos 'death'; quite possibly also vb.adj. gne:to's 'born' : sbst. ge'nesis from *g^nH1-to-/-ti- with different placing of the accent. Does this difference point to pitch or stress? I'd vote for stress any day, for the following reason: Phonetically, a syllabified sonant differs only from an asyllabic sonant in one respect, viz. with regard to duration. In English, the final syllable of rotten is articulated just like the n of not, only a bit longer, this giving the impression on experienced listeners of an additional syllable. Thus, the phonetic protoform of kma:to's must have been something like *k^m:xto's, which in Greek assimilated the final part of the segment [m:] to the articulation of the "laryngeal" (i.e., velar or uvular) low spirant that followed, this giving something in the order of [kmaxto's] whence, by the usual loss of laryngeals with compensatory lengthening, the output form kma:to's as we find it to be. Now, if the accent is shifted to the first syllable we get a substantive *k^m':xtos; the further development of this form into ka'matos can be described in various ways. I am on record for postulating two prop- vowels, before and after the cluster RH, i.e. something *ka'mxatos with coloration of the extra vowels by the laryngeal, so that these new vowels stay when the laryngeal is lost before vowel to leave precisely ka'matos. However, I now see a somewhat different possibility, namely normal development of the "syllabic m" into /a/ and a change to /ma/ of the final part of the old sequence mH2. That would come about by itself if, as would be natural, an accented syllabic sonant is a bit longer than an unaccented one, for then we get something like *k^m':mxtos, from where we expect a pre-Greek development like *ka'mxtos, whence, with the general change of H2 to a between consonants in Greek, the end-product ka'matos. I would still prefer the first of these alternative proposals, since syllabification of laryngeals is very strikingly similar all over and so just cannot be relegated to the individual histories of the separate branches (although this is precisely what has spread like a bushfire in the consensus among scholars of Indo-European in the past decade). Still, whichever way one chooses to view the change from *k^m':xtos to ka'matos, /a'ma/ obviously differs from /ma:/ by being more resolutely energetic; the segment is given a maximum of sonority right at the outset, as opposed to what it would get "by default" from the unmarked development of the underlying sequence anyway. That looks to me more like energy, i.e. stress, rather than tonal height. Also, the Greek accent limitation rules smack more of stress than of tonal height. One can easily understand that if you give the stress accent all you've got, you don't have breath for very much more word-length after the outburst, while it would be hard to understand that you could not go on speaking lower-key syllables after you had spoken a syllable on a high note - unless, of course, the high note is _very_ high and thus also demands all your energy. Barring such typological extremes, this looks very much like stress on the advance. I know that the Greek situation is not PIE, nor is that of Iranian. There are some suggestive indications of PIE stress in two facts, however: (1) The shortening of -VH to -V in vocatives: Ved. de'vi, Slav. z^eno, Gk. nu'mpha; (2) the gemination in hypochoristics, *attos, *attikos 'daddy'. These phenomena are both easily explained on the basis of a massive concentration of articulatory energy on the initial in words or wordforms used in calling or even shouting (the fashionable explanation of the vocatives by "laryngeal loss in absolute final" is just another case of collective, but irrational parrotlike repetition of some guru's reply given on the spur of the moment). Since the vocative has initial accent irrespective of the lexical place of the accent in the word-stem concerned (thus even Ved. pi'tar, Gk. pa'ter), we here find accent placing and stress-reflex correlated in a most illustrative way (nore also the gemination in the vocative-based Lat. Juppiter). Perhaps the Gordian knot is to be cut in the following way: There was a scale of phonetic registers in the language, the extreme cases being shouting and enclisis which display quite plain reductions, while in between the extremes the normal way of giving prominence to a syllable was by a somewhat higher tone - and, I'd say, a limited amount of extra articulatory energy (stress). In the further development of the languages, the emphatic pronunciations became the normal ones in many languages, and so the stress-based systems of Modern Greek and Pashto grew out of earlier systems in which the stress element was slighter. The stress element cannot have been nil, for then it would be incomprehensible that the syllable to receive stress would always be the one that earlier had the high tone. Note that the element of pitch cannot have been overly dominant in Vedic or Old Greek either, for - like stress - it is ignored in poetry which is based on syllable length only. This leaves us with a PIE system in which the prominent syllable of a given word was normally pronounced on an only slightly higher note and with only a slight degree of additional articulatory force, while in emphatic variants the stress part came to dominate more radically. How's that for a attempt to integrate the observations we can make? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 05:27:27 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 22:27:27 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stefan: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 10:37 PM > However, the Pashto vowel system is not *exactly* like the Sanskrit one, in > that it contains a phonemic schwa (which may be the short counterpart of > e:), which I overlooked, so for the parallel you were looking for, a > different language presents itself: Balochi [PR] Shamefully, I have misplaced my Balochi library. Could you share with us a bit on this? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 05:32:15 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 22:32:15 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Pete and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 12:14 PM >> 1) Sanskrit ... is more adequately described as: /a/, /a:/, /e:/, /i/, >> /i:/, /o:/, /u/, /u:/. > Sanskrit also had short (!!) [e] and [o] as allophones of /e/ and /o/ before > a non-elided initial /a/ - according to MacDonell, A Vedic Reader, p20. [PR] To my way of thinking, you have described a classic situation of a conditioned phone [e,o] of /e:,o:/ before initial {a-}. I am concerned only with the phonemic status of e:, o:. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 4 01:11:54 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:11:54 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 2:22 PM >>> .. pra-ugam >> To what IE root do you propose to attribute [-ugam]? > Hyeug - to yoke. Either the /y/ or the /H/ has caused hiatus here by > dropping out. This means that your "rule" for the combination /a + u/ is > not always true. [PR] I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. But, to explain the form, I think one looks first at OI yuga'-. Here the stress-accent has effected a zero-grade of the first syllable of the root, leaving avocalic /w/, which is realized as the phone [u]. With the stress-accent, we have forms like yo:'ga-. I think, in your example, the laryngeal is probably a part of the prefix, *pra:-, corresponding to Avestan fra:-. Therefore, I suggest that a late IE preH(3)-yeug-em was assimilated to 'preH(3)-H(3)ug-m, and that the doubled laryngeal was simplified to 'preH(3)-ug-m. Will that work for you? >> su-astaye. > The problem is again that your "rule" of consonant/vowel allophones doesn't > work and would need revising to cover cases like this. Perhaps you can > revise it without trouble - but in its present form, a succession of two > vowels is not possible. > Peter Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 4 22:54:33 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 00:54:33 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <003e01bf9a73$f1973b80$9c54113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: >>> I am under the impression that a consistent explanation ofIE /o/ has been >>> formulated: namely, that /e'/ becomes /o/ when the stress-accent is >>> transferred to another syllable. > [Rich Alderson:] >> The *pitch* accent, not the *stress* accent, at least if you are having >> recourse to Lehmann's theory of the vowel system. > [Pat Ryan:] > Correction accepted. Although, as we all know, the relationship of stress- > and tone-accents is gnarled. I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; the same goes for the intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). The unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. However, lengthened /e:/ does alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. The route to this /o:/ must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening induced by the nominative marker //-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. In stems with underlying long vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic complementary distribution). It is only in such forms that we find "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the ablaut worked. These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? Jens From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 3 18:42:04 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 21:42:04 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000331191302.00ae8c80@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 From: Stanley Friesen At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. >Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words >and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so >I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). Others have tried to explain the differnce as resulting from stressed and unstressed forms and thus provide a phonetic environment for the distribution rules. The question becomes how much grammatical information do you allow to affect the phonology. >One approach one can take in living languages is to check the >speaker's awareness of the distinction. Often an untrained >speaker is unaware of true allophonic distinctions. For >instance, the aspiration/non-aspiration of voiceless stops in >English is not generally even noticed by most speakers. It >usually has to be demonstrated to them before they can recognize >it. >On the other hand, most English speakers I know of seem to be >quite aware of the /th/ vs. /dh/ distinction. I'm sure that most English speakers recognize [th] and [dh] as different sounds. The question is do they recognize them as different phonemes. If you ask English speakers how the plural is formed they will say that you add -s to the word. Linguists know, however, that what is added in most cases is not -[es] but [ez]. This does not mean that the speaker is not aware of the distinction between [s] and [z]. The speaker is describing the spelling rule, not the pronunciation rule. Now at one time /z/ was not a phoneme distinct from /s/ in English. The pronunciation was predictable from the environment. The appearance of the two as morphophonemic variants, however, led to a phoneme split so that now /z/ is recognized as a phoneme, and so phonemic status is found only in words of recent origin, most of which are expressive in nature (sip ~ zip; sap ~ zap; fuss ~ fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 3 19:42:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:42:55 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in >> English Isn't there another minimal pair in ether : either (at least in some dialects)? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 3 23:31:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 18:31:33 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 2:27 PM >> .... But believe it >> or not, linguists will still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds >> and different analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes >> claimed for a particular language. [PG] > Interestingly, this has come up before on the list even with reference to > English - and in particular, the phonemicity of voiceless /w/ ("where" etc, > in some dialects) and c-cedilla in words like "hue". > If you want a minimal pair, I offer: hue ~ who; but even this does not > guarantee phonemic status for the initial sound in "hue". I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 06:14:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 09:14:12 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [Patrick Ryan wrote] >>>> True minimal pairs, a paltry requirement for phonemicity that would be >>>> undisputed in any other language. [Someone wrote] >>> Not at all. Many phonemes are accepted as such *without* minimal pairs >>> even in living languages. [Patrick Ryan] >> You assertion by itself does not convince me. >> Would you mind citing an example of any phoneme in any language that is not >> in a minimal pair? The criteria for establishing phonemes were already discussed, but I would like to point out another thing: in my opinion, minimal pairs are not a reasonable requirement to establishing phonemes when one is dealing with reconstructed proto-languages and not living languages. This is because only a fraction of the vocabulary can be reconstructed, and there probably aren't enough minimal pairs to establish the oppositions. The reconstructed PIE vocabulary is rather large, but if we look at PU with some 250-300 reconstructed roots, I seriously doubt it is possible to establish even half of the phoneme oppositions using minimal pairs. Ante Aikio From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 5 03:18:39 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 22:18:39 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 9:22 PM > At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: > And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as > reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the > very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). [PR] The real question to be answered is why /*o/ does not occur in verbal roots. It is this unanswered question, and the presence of /*o/ in inflected forms of verbal roots that show /*e/ that prompts the search for a conditioning factor. Actually, sinceI know your position, I was curious as to whether Larry Trask believes IE *o is phonemic. I hope he will answer the question soon. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 3 08:59:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 04:59:42 EDT Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) Message-ID: >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: >The reason for this, I think, lies in the fact that there has been extensive >reconvergence among the early forms of these stocks so that the original >branchings have been obscured. -- Occam's Razor would suggest that this may simply be a result of there not being much early differentiation. If Proto-Indo- European broke up sometime around 3000 B.C., then the western clump of dialects might well have remained fairly uniform for some time. As I said, my guess would be that around 2000 B.C. Baltic and Slavic certainly, and Germanic, italic and Celtic probably, just hadn't developed many of their later distinguishing characteristics. -something- then happened to the dialects which were going to become Proto-Germanic. When, where and why are obscure! >Yes, I grant you this. In fact (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic) almost looks like >a "which language doesn't belong here?" question. Sanskrit looks archaic >because, well, it's archaic -- as you say, it is at least 3000 years closer >to PIE than modern Lithuanian is. -- this is an interesting question. What I'd like to know -- and of course we can't know -- is what was going on with Baltic and Slavic [or more precisely, their ancestors] while Proto-Indo-Iranian was developing and apparently innovating like mad. We do know that they shared some of those innovations, but when did they become something other than "Late Proto-Indo-European"? >I would be willing to give more weight to the persistent connection with >Uralic as an indication of not having moved much. -- luckily, we have both... 8-). >Using Amerind influence on English as an example, words taken into the >superstratum will typically be toponyms (Mississippi, Mississinewa, Missouri) >or words for local flora (squash) and fauna (woodchuck, chipmunk) or local >implements (moccasin, tomahawk, wampum, wigwam) or institutions (powwow) that >the superstratum language lacks. Other words will tend to be used >pejoratively or for comic effect (papoose, squaw, mugwump). -- well, that isn't entirely comparable to most Old World cases of linguistic succession. English-speaking Europeans more or less blotted out the Native Americans along the Eastern seaboard of North America. Due as much to imported diseases as anything else, there was no prolonged period of bilingualism, nor were there many cases of non-native English speakers being linguistically assimilated. I understand that there was considerably more influence from the indigenous languages of Mexico on popular Spanish there -- although I'm operating from memory, and distant memory at that. By way of contrast, it's generally accepted that very large numbers of the Celtic-speaking British population survived the Anglo-Saxon invasions. I must admit, I am rather puzzled by the lack of substrate influence on Old English. It's not as if the Anglo-Saxons had some sort of a linguistic Academy to try and keep out loan-words, much less distinctive accents or the inevitable influence of syntax which occurs when non - native speakers acquire a second language in adulthood. >And at the expense of Slavic too, but that also is a different matter. --more of a new period, actually. Prior to 1000 AD or so, it was the other way round. Gothic, for example, started out in what is now Poland. The migration period after the fall of the Roman Empire saw the Germanics moving south and west and the western fringe of the Slavic peoples moving into the vacated territory. >>-- true; although, of course, we know that German is much closer >>geographically to the proto-Germanic _urheimat_. >But not *in* the Germanic Urheimat. --certainly the north and west of the Urheimat. It is generally accepted that Jutland and the area of Germany immediately to the south of it were part of the earliest area of Germanic speech. Granted that large areas of southern Germany were Celtic in the last centuries of the pre Christian era. >No, it is only after the Norman Conquest that the loans become easily >noticeable. There are a lot of loans from Scandinavian in English that >predate the Norman Conquest that most native speakers don't even recognize as >loans. --yes, of course, there were Scandinavian loans in pre-conquest English, although less so in the Wessex dialect that was the chancery language in Anglo-Saxon times. I should have mentioned that; although as you say those were more in the nature of cross-dialect influence. What I meant to refer to was the enormous freight of romance and other loans which came in after 1066. Also the time when other aspects of the language began to shift rapidly. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 07:59:20 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 10:59:20 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 2 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > Yes, and it would seem that Baltic (or one of its previous > manifestations) has pretty much always been in contact with > Uralic. First we have the evidence of contact between PIE and > PU, then there are the Old Iranian loans at the PFU level, I would like to correct the above slightly. There are no Iranian loans in Proto-Finno-Ugric; there are however some Pre-Aryan (and perhaps Proto-Aryan) ones. Moreover, it is disputed whether there ever was a Finno-Ugric proto-language (distinct from PU). If this was not the case (as I believe it wasn't), the Aryan loans lacking in Samoyedic were borrowed separately into and between the already differentiated "FU" languages. Since most of the show irregular sound correspondence, this seems likely. > but > there are also Slavic loans in all the FU languages (but not, > apparently, inherited from the proto-language, and who can really > tell the difference between Slavic and Baltic at this stage). > Then there are the sprachbund effects leading right down to the > present day when Baltic and Balto-Finnic are still in contact. The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. - Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 3 09:14:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 05:14:17 EDT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/00 3:07:20 AM Mountain Daylight Time, Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: << It's indeed crucial: What really are 'certain shared innovations'? They are never 'certain'. >> -- the use of the word "certain" here means "_a set of_ shared innovations", not "assured/incontestible innovations". From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 08:27:10 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 11:27:10 +0300 Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Lithuania?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > The tree model has > severe limitations and it is important to be aware of what these > limitations are. Perhaps all trees should be required to have > a warning label something like "WARNING: This tree does not > reflect reality except in certain narrow areas. Do not try to > apply this tree to real life situations." or "WARNING: This > tree is an abstraction based on limited data. Prolonged use > without constant reference to the data may be hazardous to your > mental health." It happens all too often that it is not taken into account what a family tree represents and what it doesn't. As Anthony Fox (Linguistic Reconstruction, 1995) put rather elegantly, "the wave model simply provides the means by which languages may split, whereas the tree represents the result of the split". It is an error to interpret a family tree as a straightforward depiction of how the languages in reality did split from each other. > Even so, the tree model is still useful for certain things so it > can't really be dispensed with. And anything that provides a > better model of the features that the tree doesn't, will probably > distort the features that are made clear by the tree, as well as > running the risk of being too complex to be comprehensible (e.g., > isogloss maps or dialect geography). The tree model cannot be dispensed with because it actually is implicit in the comparative method itself. I can't see how the method could be practiced without an underlying assumtion of a family tree. But you of course mean whether it is useful to use the family tree as a tool for illustrating genetic relationships. I'd say no, unless one constantly bears in mind the warnings you gave above :) There are some sorry examples, e.g. the traditional binary family tree of the Uralic languages. In retrospect, I'd say that it was a hindrance to the progress of Uralistics, but nevertheless its justification remained unquestioned for almost 100 years. Regards, Ante Aikio From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 3 11:39:46 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 13:39:46 +0200 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <200003310951.p4772@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > [...] > I would like to stress that no comparative linguist accepts any publication > combined with the names 'Shevoroshkin', Starostin, Bengtson, Ruhlen..... > [...] Then please accept my resignation from the guild, for I'd like to go on being inspired by work done by scholars like these who are not afraid to present an idea for consideration before the matter has advanced to the point of being self-evident. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From jamm at primus.com.au Mon Apr 3 23:11:12 2000 From: jamm at primus.com.au (peter edwards) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 07:11:12 +0800 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Hello. With all due respect - one ought not to criticize some one's ability especially when you don't use the conjunction 'nor' correctly. 'Neither' would have been better. Eg: sound correspondences nor [sic] in lexico... . 'Nor' replaces 'and not'. Peter Edwards Editor-in-Chief Melbourne Palate, Food & Wine Magazine ---------- > From: Hans Holm > Date: Friday, March 31, 2000 3:51 PM [ moderator snip ] > These 'lumpers' do not have any competence in e.g. sound correpondences nor > in lexicostatistics at all. Most list members discussing laryngeals in IE > roots will not even react on this 'recommendation'. > Regards > Hans J. Holm > D-30629 Hannover From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 4 03:40:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 22:40:31 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear Hans and IEists: [ moderator snip ] [PR] I must say that I am rather surprised to see the work of several linguists dismissed without a reading --- solely on the strength of their alleged lack of expertise. Since Peiros was not specifically named in the blanket indictment, I still suggest that list-members read the essay, and judge for themselves whether competence of the craft is demonstrated in the article. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Apr 4 10:50:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 13:50:08 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: > In the various IE handbooks, I've seen a number of phonetic solutions > proposed for the problem of what the laryngeals were phonetically, but all of > them look like typologically odd sets of sounds given standard > reconstructions for PIE. > In the '70s and '80s, phonological typology was called on pretty heavily to > motivate the glottalic hypothesis for PIE. I'm puzzled about the near > absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic > values of the laryngeals might have been. > Have I missed obvious sources? Has there been discussion of the typology of > laryngeals? I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be reconstructed (/x? x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > [S]. Regards, Ante Aikio From g_sandi at hotmail.com Tue Apr 4 11:03:12 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 16:33:12 +0530 Subject: Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse" Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: proto-language Sent: Wednesday, 29 March, 2000 5:32 AM > Dear Gabor and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Gabor Sandi" > Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 9:36 AM >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: proto-language >> Sent: Saturday, 25 March, 2000 4:10 PM >>> Dear Gabor and IEists: >> [ moderator snip ] > [GS] >> Gimbutas's arguments are based on >> archaeology, as well as a certain amount of theorizing that goes along with >> any innovative scientific thinking. There are many linguists who accept the >> Kurgan hypothesis - probably more than those who reject it outright. > [PR] > My problem with Gimbutas is not the Kurgan Hypothesis per se but the > extraneous ideological interpretation she attached to the bare > archaeological facts. [GS} But aren't there extraneous ideological interpretations on the other side as well? Reading through Renfrew, Whittle et al. I can't help noticing a very strong resistance to the ideas that (1) populations can move from one area to another, displacing, swallowing or simply eliminating the previous inhabitants; and (2) one language can displace another, either through process (1), or - even without major population displacement - by having people switch from one language to another, for whatever reason. The archaeological buzzword is "process archaeology", which seems to claim that, in general, populations may go through major changes in pottery, burial customs, agriculture and housing without any major change in their ethnic identity (including language). For example, it is claimed that when the major archaeological culture of the North European plain switched from TRB to Corded Ware, there was no change in language (otherwise Renfrew's hypothesis is refuted, at least for this region). The argument is purely ideological. There can of course be language switch even if the material culture remains the same. For example, I doubt that there are any archaeological signs of the switch from Cornish to English in Cornwall in the 17th-18th centuries, or - for that matter - of the switch from Irish to English in Ireland during the 19th and early 20th centuries (aside from the small remnants in the Gaeltacht). I would say that when there is a major cultural switch, a language shift is even more likely. Insofar as Gimbutas's idealization of Old Europe is concerned, I am skeptical. Just because people worshipped a mother Goddess and had superb pottery does not mean that their society was all that pleasant for everyone. The poor peasant lad born on the wrong side of the mud-track might well have preferred the exciting life and opportunities offered by some hero-worshipping horsemen moving to the area, and for all we know this might have contributed to the success of the Indo-Europeans. But all this is my supposition, and I certainly would not advocate it as dogma. The biggest gap in the Kurgan theory is the apparent lack of cultural continuity between groups of IE speakers that are supposed to have had a linear historical relation. E.g. Kurgan > Globular Amphora, Balkan Bronze > Greek Bronze, etc. Although Gimbutas et al. try valiently to show that some artifacts (say, burial mounds) do show such continuity, the evidence is certainly debatable. However, similar gaps exist with the Neolithic IE hypothesis as well. In the final analysis, language switching must have occurred somewhere along the line, the question is: where (or rather when?) With best wishes, Gabor From g_sandi at hotmail.com Tue Apr 4 11:43:32 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 17:13:32 +0530 Subject: Brahui Message-ID: [GS] >From Gabor Sandi mailto:g_sandi at hotmail.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Anthony Appleyard Sent: Tuesday, 28 March, 2000 10:32 PM > Brahui is a Dravidian language spoken in a most unexpected place :: > Baluchistan, which is a northwest part of Pakistan. Such an outlier weighs > on the history of the IE-descended and other languages in the area. I have > heard two theories re Brahui:- > (1) It is a valuable relic of a time when Dravidian was spoken over much of > India. > (2) The Brahui-speakers are descended from soldiers that were raised in > Dravidian South India fairly recently and dumped in Baluchistan when no > longer needed. As such, their language is irrelevant here. > Which is true? [GS] As I happen to live in India right now, I have been able to collect a fair amount of information on this topic, some of it not easily reachable in the west. I don't think anyone can answer your question "Which is true?" - the truth of the matter is probably undecidable, given the insufficient amount of data. All we can talk about is probabilities, and the consensus on this seems to point at answer (2) above. Perhaps the best summary of this view is by Josef Elfenbein, one of the top experts on Brahui, who says in Chapter 14 ("Brahui") of Steever (1998): "Brahui prehistory is entirely obscure. I have argued against the traditional assumption that Brahuis are a relic of the original Dravidian migrations into India, c. 3000 BCE, who remained in Kalat as the first group to separate from the other Dravidians. In my view a more prosaic history is far more likely. The Brahuis, never a very close-knit group, migrated northwest from the central Deccan in India across Gujarat and into Sindh in many waves from about 800-1100 CE. Afterwards they entered the Kalat highlands." (p.389) In further discussion, Elfenbein claims that Brahui is a North Dravidian language closely related to Kurux (spoken in the states of Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh) and Malto (spoken in Bihar and West Bengal). This close relationship is also stated by Zograph (1982). Elfenbein's views on the origin of Brahui are also accepted by Sergent (1997), pp.129-130. This scholar refers to evidence provided by Elfenbein (I don't have the source myself) that all Indo-Iranian loanwords into Brahui are from Baluchi, a language with which Brahui has a long history of symbiosis, which is a language that was introduced from further west into what is now Pakistan only in the 13th century AD at the earliest. Had Brahui been in the area before the arrival of Baluchi, we would of course expect loanwords from other Indo-Iranian languages as well, say from Pashto or Sindhi. The only scholar I could find who supports the theory of the Brahui being present in the area from Harappan times on is Parpola (1994). Parpola is a scholar who has long claimed that the Harappans were Dravidian speakers - a theory that is not discredited at all, in my view, even if the Brahui are recent arrivals in Baluchistan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Parpola, Asko (1994). Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge University Press. Sergent, Bernard (1997). Genese de l'Inde [Genesis of India]. Paris: Payot. Steever, Sanford [ed] (1998). The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge. Zograph, G.A. (1982). Languages of South Asia. London: Routledge. > How much is Dravidian related to Elamite, as I have heard ideas of? [GS] I think that Elamite is so little known that no solid theorizing is possible. An article on the topic (unfortunately I don't have access to it) is: McAlpin, David, "Towards Proto-Elamo-Dravidian". Language 50:89-101. > Where does the word "Dravidian" come from? [GS] >From Sanskrit drbviDa / draviDa (D stands for the retroflex d). This is a borrowing of a Dravidian word related to Tamil "tamiR" (R is r with two dots under it), meaning "the Tamil language, the Tamils". For all its cognates, see the appropriate entry in Burrow & Emenau (1998): A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. > As regards the idea that the language of the Indus valley civilization was > Dravidian, I read once that:- > (1) Two Indus Valley gambling dices were found, and on their faces were > pictures of things whose names resembled the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 in > Dravidian. > (2) Over time more and more Dravidian words get into Indian Sanskrit > writings, but no more in the Andhra period and after, as if that is when the > lower castes in the north of India finally forgot their old Dravidian > languages. > What is usual opinion about this? [GS] No comments on this for now. Best wishes, Gabor Sandi From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 3 16:35:09 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 16:35:09 GMT Subject: Tonal and stress accents Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote about IE stress. The image that I had was this: IE originally has a pitch accent, and it had no zero-grading, and the IE-speakers hunted on foot on the steppes. They domesticated animals including the horse, and that lead them into a period of expansion; as they absorbed speakers of other languages around, foreign influences including stress accent got in. Pitch accent later reasserted itself, but while the stress accent was current, zero-grading came in by the common weakening of unstressed vowels. Before that, word forms that are distinguished by zero grade / normal grade in classical IE were distinguished by accent only: {!elEIqwom} = "I was leaving"; {!eleiqwOm} > {!eliqwOm} = "I left". Some of the other peoples absorbed in that time likely had no laryngeals in their own old languages, and that may be why later IE often lost laryngeals. From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Fri Apr 7 06:59:16 2000 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 08:59:16 +0200 Subject: PIE origins of 'sinus'..... Message-ID: Does anyone happen to know the PIE root(s) of 'sinus' (a curvature, flexure, bend; a cavity within a bone, esp. within the bones of the face, connecting with the nasal cavities) and the obsolete 'sinuate' "to creep or crawl in a winding course", which have come down to English via Latin and/or French? Given that the verb 'snake' (<*sneg-) is defined as "to follow a twisting or winding course; creep, crawl", is the hypothesis of an etymological link with PIE *sneg- "to creep, crawl" tenable, reflexes coming down in zero-grade form (*sn-) via Germanic and in full-grade form (*sVn-) via Latin/French? Many thanks, Dennis. From chris at mail.syrinx.com.au Thu Apr 6 05:59:00 2000 From: chris at mail.syrinx.com.au (Dr ChRIS CLEiRIGh) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 15:59:00 +1000 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. > Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" > at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically > conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to > insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite > the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks > more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). > Others have tried to explain the differnce as resulting from > stressed and unstressed forms and thus provide a phonetic > environment for the distribution rules. The question becomes how > much grammatical information do you allow to affect the > phonology. > I'm sure that most English speakers recognize [th] and [dh] as > different sounds. The question is do they recognize them as > different phonemes. If you ask English speakers how the plural > is formed they will say that you add -s to the word. Linguists > know, however, that what is added in most cases is not -[es] but > [ez]. This does not mean that the speaker is not aware of the > distinction between [s] and [z]. The speaker is describing the > spelling rule, not the pronunciation rule. Now at one time /z/ > was not a phoneme distinct from /s/ in English. The > pronunciation was predictable from the environment. The > appearance of the two as morphophonemic variants, however, led to > a phoneme split so that now /z/ is recognized as a phoneme, and > so phonemic status is found only in words of recent origin, most > of which are expressive in nature (sip ~ zip; sap ~ zap; fuss ~ > fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same > relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable > environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic > basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new > coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the > speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). Does your dialect recognise a distinction between `teeth' and `teethe'? chris From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 05:10:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 22:10:26 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:42 PM 4/3/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most" >at the beginning. The fact that this is a grammatically >conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to >insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite >the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks >more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction). You mean 'teeth'-'teethe'? That looks like a fine minimal pair to me. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Apr 6 07:49:01 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 08:49:01 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: >> At 03:33 PM 3/28/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: > >> And this is why I maintain /o/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in PIE as >> reconstructed. There is no *rule* for predicting them, unless one uses the >> very presence of /o/ to infer some conditioning factor (which is circular). No; I didn't write this. Somebody else did. I have expressed no views at all on the phonemes of PIE. > Actually, sinceI know your position, I was curious as to whether Larry Trask > believes IE *o is phonemic. > I hope he will answer the question soon. Sorry, but I am not an IEist, and I have no view on this matter. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 5 02:54:00 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 21:54:00 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 1:00 PM > On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Larry Trask wrote: >>> [PRp] >>> Sorry, I just cannot accept that. If /o/ is an IE phoneme, it should occur >>> in true minimal pairs. I have this on the authority of a degreed linguist >>> with whom I have consulted on this question. Your reluctance to accept this >>> basic method of establishing a phoneme continues to amaze me! [LT] >> This is *a* method of establishing phonemes. But it is not *the only* >> method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of two sounds cannot >> be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme. [RW] > I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to > establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [PR] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. [RW] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English minimal pair > 'thigh' / 'thy' > (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] > is clearly marginal) > Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in > English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless > claim that there has been a phomemic split similar to what occurred with > /s/ and /z/). That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic status for both. > This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] > occuring in voiced environments [PR] What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [RW] > and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. [PR] I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological conditioning factors. [RW] > Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot > be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but also > 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they can't > be assigned to separate phonemes.' [PR] I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [RW] > Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but contrastive > environments are a clincher. [PR] I find this totally unacceptable. Show me contrastive phonological environments. [RW] > As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, similar items that > are in complementary distribution are usually aspects of the same thing. But > believe it or not, linguists will still disagree on the phonemic status of > sounds and different analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes > claimed for a particular language. [PR] Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Apr 7 05:17:29 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 17:17:29 +1200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>> Robert Whiting 04/04 6:42 AM >>> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 19:17:46 -0800 From: Stanley Friesen At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several days without anyone questioning the original statement about complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur, etc etc. [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly controversial view ("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken as a simple fact. Ross Clark From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 13:34:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:34:59 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <001401bf9dc4$c02eb2e0$2dd31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 06:31 PM 4/3/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Peter and IEists: >[PG] >> Interestingly, this has come up before on the list even with reference to >> English - and in particular, the phonemicity of voiceless /w/ ("where" etc, >> in some dialects) and c-cedilla in words like "hue". >> If you want a minimal pair, I offer: hue ~ who; but even this does not >> guarantee phonemic status for the initial sound in "hue". >I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. >In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. That is also my analysis: c-cedilla is an allophone of [h] before a /y/, in this case from the "long=u", /yu:/. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:38:00 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:38:00 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pat said: > I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. > In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we also actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure into which potential phonemes fit. Peter From brent at bermls.oau.org Thu Apr 6 10:25:55 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:25:55 -0400 Subject: English phones [th] and [dh] (was: minimal pairs) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 09:42:04PM +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: . . . > fuzz, etc.). The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same > relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable > environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic > basis) or as morphonemic variants. However, there are no new > coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the > speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet). What about ether versus either? -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 6 15:08:57 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:08:57 +0200 Subject: th/dh: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote: > [Quote from earlier posting:] >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair [...] because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. Stanley Friesen :] >> Personally, I have trouble with this analysis. "Deictic words >> and pronouns" is NOT what I would call a phonetic condition, so >> I would rule it out as a possible rule for governing allophones. Robert Whiting: > [] The question becomes how > much grammatical information do you allow to affect the > phonology. [...] This is an illustrative discussion. Basically, it boils down to asking what the term phoneme means. And if you have only phonemes and non-phonemes in a black-and-white world, and everybody is at liberty to draw the line as he pleases, you are not likely to reach any kind of agreement. But as soon as you enter the world of nuances and degrees, you can soon agree on HOW close English th and dh are to being phonemically identical. That is the objective stuff progress is made of. There are similar impossible, and so eternal, discussions about the placing of syllable boundaries, about syllabicity vs. lack of it, the number of vowel phonemes demanded by a language, or even same-language : dialect : different-language. Such matters must be viewed on a scale to make any sense beyond the reason for quarrels. Jens From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Apr 6 09:55:23 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:55:23 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <009801bf9d2d$4d770c80$fcd21b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> However, the Pashto vowel system is not *exactly* like the Sanskrit one, in >> that it contains a phonemic schwa (which may be the short counterpart of >> e:), which I overlooked, so for the parallel you were looking for, a >> different language presents itself: Balochi > [PR] >Shamefully, I have misplaced my Balochi library. >Could you share with us a bit on this? What do you want me to share ? A concise grammar of Balochi ? Since it is an Indo-European language it would be bad manners to teach the essentials of this trade on a list like this ;-) The issue at issue is the number and nature of vowel phonemes present in the language. It is identical to that of Sanskrit: a, i, i, a:, i:, u:, e, o (the latter two inherently long). As far as I remember you categorically denied the possibility that such a system could exist. Now, it does, which removes every further claim you are building or trying to build on this unsubstantiated claim. As always ;-) St. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:16:40 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:16:40 +0100 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: >> Sanskrit short [e] and [o] > > To my way of thinking, you have described a classic situation of a > conditioned phone [e,o] of /e:,o:/ before initial {a-}. Yes, of course. I met another interesting example of /e/ just this morning: RV 1:154:1. The whole line goes: vicakrama:nas tredhoruga:yah. "having strode out - triply - wide-paced" The metre requires 11 syllables, and there are only ten. The usual recourse here is to separate out the resolved syllables in sandhi - here the o after dh. But Macdonnell says of tredha:, "The first syllable [tre..] must be pronounced ... equivalent to two short syllables; the resolution tredha: uruga:yah would produce both an abnormal break and an abnormal cadence". So there's /e/ pronounced as two short syllables. Anyone wish to suggest it's /ai/? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 6 19:29:15 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 20:29:15 +0100 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: >> Hyeug - to yoke. > I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. I have been hunting through my notes, and I'm not sure now either! I picked it up from somewhere, without keeping a record of who suggested it. I only have a note that Sanskrit occasionally has a long augment before this root a:yunak, and a reference to the Greek development in /dzugon/, which one or two people have suggested shows an initial Hy cluster (#Hy > /dz/, #y > /h/). And my Sanskrit books show no sign of a long augment! Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Apr 10 03:42:00 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 22:42:00 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:54 PM >>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: [PR] To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I support with some reservations: "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented formerly received a secondary pitch accent." Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. Lehmann's position is maintained more recently (1993) in his _Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics_, where he writes on page 131: "Deflectyed grade is explained by loss of primary accent on a vowel and replacement by a secondary accent. If in derivation the accent fell on an affix rather than on the root, the root vowel under such secondary accent changed to o, as in Greek nomo's "pasture," nomeu's "shepherd" in contrast with the vowel of the accented root in the verb ne'mo: "I pasture". Though Jens may assert correctly that I personally am not as familiar with the literature as he is, I sincerely doubt whether Jens would be justified in asserting the same for Professor Lehmann. [JR] > I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the > /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; [PR] Perfect As Lehmann sees it, *o' is the result of a secondary tone-accent of a stress- and tone-accent stage that was preceded by stress-accent stage. During the combined stress- and tone-accent stage, a hypothetical perfect 1. p. s. *we'id-eH(2) would have become, in the plural, 1. p. p. *wid-me', with the full- and zero-grades being the result of the stress-accent while the tone-accents (marked by ') shifted from the root-syllable to the affix. As is well known, the perfect "often, but not always, had reduplication". Therefore, the easiest explanation for the *o of the attested *wo'id-eH(2) is to assume that it is the simplification of an originally reduplicated form: *we'-woid-eH(2) with the reduplicating syllable receriving the primary tone-accent and root-syllable receiving a secondary tone-accent, analogous with *de'-dork-eH(2) [Greek de'dorka]. [JR] > the same goes for the > intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has > o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). [PR] In Beekes, I see no *o-vocalism in intensive reduplication (*we'r-w(e)rt-, 'to turn'; and I am not familiar with the IE reduplicated aorist (Beekes lists only three types: stem, thematic, and sigmatic) --- could you give an example? As for reduplicated presents, I cannot put my finger on an example without a final root laryngeal, which complicates the pictures. But if you have an example of root *Ce'C- and reduplicated present: *Ce'CoC-, the same explanation as above for the perfect could be applied. [JR] > unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, [PR] We are, if Lehmann is correct, dealing with *two* phenomena: 1) changes brought about by tone-accent shifts; and 2) changes brought about by stress-accent shifts. Without specifying exactly which you have in mind, statements become problematical to interpret. [JR] > cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. > *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an > optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like > *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; > ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is > *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other > examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. [PR] That is exactly what we should expect as a result of the shift of stress-accent from *e. [JR] > However, lengthened /e:/ does > alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to > *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem > eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if > the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not > by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply > unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their > accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. [PR] I find the "contrast" between "deaccented" and "simply unaccented" unconvincing based on the examples given since the data could be explained as simply as due to the different times during which the compounds were formed: lime:'n at a time when the affix was stress-accented; a'kmo:n at a time when secondary tonal accent produced *o. What seems important from the examples is that the affix -*men at one time had both the stress- and tone-accents. Also, in the case of *swe'so:r, a component of *ser-, 'female', has been proposed (see Pokorny p. 911, under 4. *ser-). [JR] > The route to this /o:/ > must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening > induced by the nominative marker file://-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing > but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. [PR] Frankly, lengthened variants of reduced vowels need a swipe of Occam's razor. [JR] > In stems with underlying long > vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. > *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but > acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of > the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the > /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. [PR] Well, this explanation does not explain Latin pe:s very well. And the situation of *de/e:m-/*do/o:m- is so fluid that another example would surely be better. [JR] > - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic > vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the > accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what > follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but > plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: > /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form > before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you > look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced > segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s > of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in > the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have > been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. [PR] I would gladly grant the IE *-s (2. p. sing.), which I derive from earlier /s[h]o/ has a different origin from nominative *-s, which I derive from earlier /so/. But I cannot accept that voicing of a root-final obstruent determines the quality of the root-vowel --- at least, consistently, for we have *pe/e:d- and *de/e:m- alongside *po/o:d- and *do/o:m-. [JR] > - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the > causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very > great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the > /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. > an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, > developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic > complementary distribution). [PR] It is the firmest of my beliefs that IE had *no* infixes. An only apparent exception is the *metathesized* -n- in certain present stems. [JR] > It is only in such forms that we find > "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, > because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and > found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer > any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a > phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen > as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where > there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were > fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. > *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the > ablaut worked. [PR] A rather complicated solution when Lehmann's simple solution is at hand: *me'n- + *e'ye- -> *mone'ye-. [JR] > These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of > examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their > actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is > shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? [PR] And when will you cease patronizing condescension? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru Thu Apr 6 05:22:37 2000 From: KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru (KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 09:22:37 +0400 Subject: The Indo-European Database Message-ID: Dear Indo-Europeanists, Re: The Indo-European Database online A new scientific project was launched this week on the Web. Ten leading websites devoted to linguistic, historical and cultural studies of Europe and Asia merged to create The Indo-European Database, the widest and most reliable source of academic knowledge about Indo-European languages, history, archaeology, and mythology. The Indo-European Database (TIED) introduces a wide range of brand new issues of research in linguistic and historical area, grammars and glossaries, publications and etymologies written and collected by the Members. Joint projects will be implemented in the field of Indo-European studies. Besides, the Indo-European Forum, a part of TIED, acting since September, 1999, has been renovated to satisfy all needs of the interested audience. The Indo-European Database is open for new Members and Authors who would like to contribute to the research of social sciences and who is willing to carry new ideas and theories to the audience. The Database is a non-commercial project, all its materials are free for everyone. See The Indo-European Database at: http://indoeuropean.cjb.net Russian version available at: http://indoeuropean.da.ru See the Indo-European Forum also at: http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist Cyril Babaev TIED Administrator KirillVB at cc.sibal.ru From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 6 19:29:39 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:29:39 -0600 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <051e90513210340ISPSRV17@mail02.iprimus.com.au> Message-ID: > With all due respect - one ought not to criticize some one's ability > especially when you don't use the conjunction 'nor' correctly. 'Neither' > would have been better. Eg: sound correspondences nor [sic] in lexico... . > 'Nor' replaces 'and not'. This type of comment is not appropriate to our discussions. Many of our colleagues here are non-native speakers of English and the prescriptive injunction which is being declared as a mark of intelligence here is not even a part of most native speaker's grammars. [ Moderator's note: Prof. McLaughlin is entirely correct, and I apologize to the entire reader- ship, and more especially to Mr. Holm, for allowing this to go out. --rma ] John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 6 19:54:49 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:54:49 -0600 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <008701bf9de7$9dbeda00$2dd31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Pat Ryan wrote] > I must say that I am rather surprised to see the work of several linguists > dismissed without a reading --- solely on the strength of their alleged lack > of expertise. I must agree with Pat here. The term "lumpers" is exceptionally misleading since many of the shining stars of our craft (at least in the history of linguistics in North America) were dedicated "lumpers" during the 30's, 40's, 50's, and well into the 60's and as late as the 70's. Names like Edward Sapir, Mary Haas, Carl Voegelin, Benjamin Whorf, George Trager, and others were all lumpers in the middle part of the last century. Even today, besides the obvious "lumpers" who get most of the publicity, there are scholars to do high-quality work in other areas of linguistics who are dipping into the waters of "lumping". Pam Munro and Sydney Lamb spring immediately to mind. In Native American studies, the whole idea of the "Penutian" stock was considered unprovable and a bad idea 20 years ago to most Amerindianists. There had even been some good studies that most American linguists took as a firm disproof of the notion. But a group of good scholars continued to work with the topic and have published some very sound conclusions about the genetic and areal relations on the West Coast that have validated some parts of the Penutian hypothesis. They have convinced many conservative scholars in the field because of their sound methodology. Our fellow lister, Scott DeLancey, comes to mind immediately in this group. An entire issue of the journal International Journal of American Linguistics was devoted to the topic a few issues back. So we can't just dismiss "lumpers" out of hand because they are some very vaguely defined body of scholars who are pushing the boundaries of our traditionally accepted language families. Some popular "lumpers" are not using really sound methodology in their work (Greenberg & co.), but the lesser known "lumpers" are using very sound methodology indeed. Perhaps we really need to distinguish between those "lumpers" who only publish working papers with possibly suggestive and unsifted data (Greenberg, et al.) and those who publish finished proofs with well-analyzed and evaluated data. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 6 22:06:32 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:06:32 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 6:39 AM > On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Hans Holm wrote: >> [...] >> I would like to stress that no comparative linguist accepts any publication >> combined with the names 'Shevoroshkin', Starostin, Bengtson, Ruhlen..... >> [...] > Then please accept my resignation from the guild, for I'd like to go on > being inspired by work done by scholars like these who are not afraid to > present an idea for consideration before the matter has advanced to the > point of being self-evident. > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen I would like to whole-heartedly endorse Jens' position here. Jens himself has had some imaginative ideas that are worthy of serious consideration; and I am thinking long and hard about possible adequate answers to his last posting on *e/*o. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From alderson at netcom.com Thu Apr 6 18:29:44 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:29:44 -0700 Subject: "lumpers" In-Reply-To: <200003310951.p4772@h2.maus.de> (Hans_Holm@h2.maus.de) Message-ID: While I have not had the pleasure of meeting the others named by Mr. Holm, I studied Anatolian linguistics with Prof. Shevoroshkin for an entire semester. Although I was not interested in the (Illic^-Svityc^) Nostratic etymologies proposed for various difficult Lycian, Lydian, or Carian items, my overall impression of him was positive: He clearly is an excellent linguist with a strong grasp of the methodologies of historical linguistics. I would not even rule out a work associated with Mr. Ruhlen without at least a cursory examination. I daresay most list members are as tolerant as I... Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Thu Apr 6 13:45:25 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 06:45:25 -0700 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:50 PM 4/4/00 +0300, Ante Aikio wrote: >I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but >another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. >I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may >tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are >etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) >*h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic >(retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be >reconstructed (/x? x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for >*h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution >[?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. I, too, for other reasons, have drifted away from H1 as [?]. I am not sure whether this counts as typological reasoning, but I strongly lean towards a labialized H3 on the basis of parallelism with the labialized obstruents. So, my current "best guess" for the laryngeals is something like yours, /x', x, x^w/, or /h, x, x^w/. (With /x/ being a *back* fricative, and /x'/ or /h/ being less far back). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 6 17:27:56 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 19:27:56 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > [Quoting the 25 Mar 2000 posting by Herb Stahlke:] >> I'm puzzled about the near >> absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic >> values of the laryngeals might have been. [...] > [Ante Aiko:] [...] > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are > etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) > *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic > (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be > reconstructed (/x? x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for > *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution > [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves, and make very good sense typologically as well. A voiced value of /H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; the assimilation in Germanic *kwikw-a-z 'quick' demands its being velar, and its o-coloration makes it round, ergo this was a "rounded gamma", a voiced labiovelar fricative. The cases of /H2/ surfacing as /k/ (costa, koza), and its Anatolian reflexes makes it a dorsal fricative, evidence like Skt. gen. patha's makes it voiceless and h-like, and its a-coloration demands some degree of aperture; in sum, this was a voiceless velar or postvelar fricative without lip-rounding. Both /H2/ and /H3/ cause a preceding high vowel to undergo lowering in its final part in Greek, Armenian and Tocharian, while /H1/ does no such thing: the products of /iH2, iH3/ are Gk. /ja:, jo:/, Arm. /ya/, Toch. /ya:/, while /iH1/ simply yields /i:/. That means no particularly marked degree of aperture. Note that also a preceding /o/ is left unaffected, /oH1/ giving simple /o:/ all over the place; this means no particularly marked degree of closenes either. The riddle is solve by the observation that, after /H1/ and /H2/, but not efter /H3/, the suffix *-tlo-/*-tro- turns up aspirated: Lat. cri:brum, fa:bula, but po:culum. It is customary to derive Lat. -br-/-bl- and Gk. -thr-/-thl- from IE *-dhr-/*-dhl-, but Birgit Olsen suggests IE *-thr-/*-thl- with voiceless aspirates which are not excluded by any material we know. Thus, both H1 and H2 aspirate, at least a _following_ /t/, and /H1/ causes no "breaking" in the development of i/u + H, while H2 and H3 do. The only phonetic value that accomodates all of these observations is a plain [h], i.e. a simple voiceless continuation of the preceding vowel. The set [h], [x], [{ghw}] is very close to Dutch which has [h], [x] and [{gh}], while in many languages gamma is rounded, cf., e.g., the development underlying the orthography of English law, corresponding to Danish lov (Swedish lag). I have therefore bee preaching this set for quite many years (on record since 1982, I see), often against heavy criticism. I now see the very same set advocated, without explicit reasons, in Meier-Bru"gger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Has the gospel been heard? At any rate, the agreement is nice to see. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 6 22:20:25 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:20:25 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:50 AM > On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> In the various IE handbooks, I've seen a number of phonetic solutions >> proposed for the problem of what the laryngeals were phonetically, but all >> of them look like typologically odd sets of sounds given standard >> reconstructions for PIE. >> In the '70s and '80s, phonological typology was called on pretty heavily >> to motivate the glottalic hypothesis for PIE. I'm puzzled about the near >> absence of application of typology to the question of what the phonetic >> values of the laryngeals might have been. >> Have I missed obvious sources? Has there been discussion of the typology >> of laryngeals? > I am not familiar with the typological discussion (if there was any), but > another thing that may be of interest in this context comes into my mind. > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. Since there are > etymologies that show such substitutions as 1) *h[1-3] > Uralic *k, 2) > *h[1-3] > Uralic *x (read *x as [Y] =gamma), 3) *h[1-2] > Uralic > (retroflex) *S, it seems probable that some [x]-type sounds must be > reconstructed (/x4 x xw/, perhaps?) Such phonetic values as e.g. [?] for > *h1 proposed by e.g. Beekes 1995 seem problematic to me; a substitution > [?] > [k] seems perfectly possible, but [?] > [Y] does not, let alone [?] > > [S]. [PR] I think a ready earliest pattern, the source of which will remain respectfully nameless, would indicate: /*h, *H (he:), *$ ('ain), *?/ although by slightly later times, what seems to me like a natural development would be: /*h, *x, *Y (gamma), *0/ which seems to correspond fairly well to the Uralic facts: perhaps: /*h, *0/ -> *k(2); /*Y/ -> *x; /*x/ (if palatalized before *e) -> /*S/ Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Apr 11 15:56:17 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 15:56:17 GMT Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: I am tempted to believe that H3 was the Arabic ayin sound, and H2 was its voiceless equivalent sometimes written as "h" with a dot under and sometimes as "2", i.e. epiglottal fricatives. This is from (1) the a-flavoring tendency of H2 and the o-flavoring tendency of H3, which matches the tendency of the epiglottals (at least in my mouth) when I tried learning Arabic, and (2) IE / Semitic equations such as Greek odussomai = "I hate" < IE H3-d-w, compare Arabic {3adu:w} = "enemy" (3 = ayin), Greek awe:mi = "I, being a wind, blow" < IE H2-w-H1, c.f. Arabic {2awa:!} = "air" (! = glottal stop). Some have postulated two H1 laryngeals :: well, if so, one was the glottal stop and the other was the ordinary "h" sound. When was the word "laryngeal" first given to these sounds? The name seems to show an idea by someone that these sounds were pronounced in that sort of area of the mouth and throat. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 6 18:13:08 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 13:13:08 -0500 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Can you elaborate on Germanic-Uralic contacts? Are you only talking about Scandinavian or all Germanic? [snip] >The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of >contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as >for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as >you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. > - Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 6 18:32:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 14:32:23 EDT Subject: Of Trees, nodes, and minimal paths (was Re: Urheimat in Lithuania?) Message-ID: Of course, one basic problem is that the means by which languages "split" is not uniform. Eg., gradual differentiation within a large but contiguous dialect continuum will have rather different results from an abrupt divorce due to rapid, long-distance migration which "leapfrogs" over intervening languages. Magyar, for instance, isolated on all sides by IE languages. Or imagine that Vandal -- the result of a migration from Poland to Tunisia, spanning about one human lifetime -- had survived into the present, isolated from all other Germanic languages. Or a relict like Crimean Gothic would be in the same position, albeit for different reasons. I suspect Tocharian was a case somewhat like this. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 6 18:40:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 14:40:05 EDT Subject: Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse" Message-ID: >g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: >But aren't there extraneous ideological interpretations on the other side as >well? The archaeological buzzword is "process archaeology", which seems to >claim that, in general, populations may go through major changes in pottery, >burial customs, agriculture and housing without any major change in their >ethnic identity (including language). -- exactly. It's a wholly unwarranted assumption; and it severely contradicts what we'd argue by analogy from the historical record. Pure ideological imposition. >Insofar as Gimbutas's idealization of Old Europe is concerned, I am >skeptical. -- me too. In fact, what really strikes me as "stretching" in Gimbutas is the extreme over-elaboration of the hypothesis, attempting a precision (with the various 'waves' and whatnot) that, at this distance in time, just isn't possible. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 03:24:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:24:57 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: In what follows, I believe that "/g/" represents an 8-bit character (c-cedilla) that was mangled by the mail system. Please, remember that this system is very old, and does not handle 8-bit mail at all. --rma ] Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:38 PM [PG] > My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it > certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be > recognised. [PR] I believe you may be exaggerating a little here. In my travels around the country, I have heard a number of pronunciations including /hjuw/; in fact. the only time I can remember /g/, the palatal dorsal spirant, is here in the South: /g|/. [PG] > The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people > (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. [PR] Yes, I would have to say that /g/ (c-cedilla) is an allophone of /h/ in this instance though, of course, we might want to consider it a devoiced /j/. [PG] > Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we also > actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure into which > potential phonemes fit. [PR] I agree that qualification is sensible. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 14 04:49:51 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:49:51 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Larry Trask] This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. But it is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme. [Robert Whiting] I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [Pat Ryan] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. [Me] This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs out with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal pair. Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the voicing). But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, sooth/soothe, etc. However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic and the historical changes that have further obscured them in Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] 'uncle' /ata/, etc. On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, 2Panamint is a good counterexample. In languages where typical roots are monosyllabic (like English), one may find many minimal pairs, but even in English, where there are 7392 possible one syllable words of the structure (C)V(C), there are only 1729 of these that actually occur in my dialect of English. For example, the largest "minimal set" consists of the frame [_ir]. I have 'peer, tier, beer, deer, gear, cheer, jeer, fear, sear, sheer, hear, veer, mere, near, leer, rear, we're, year'. Notice that [kir], [thir], [dhir], [zir], [zhir], [ngir], and [hwir] do not exist. There are also no words in my dialect that start with a [g] and end in a voiceless alveopalatal affricate. In Panamint, the typical root structure is CV(X)CV (X is a gemination marker, an /h/, or a nasal). The bisyllabic structure of the typical root means that minimal pairs are far less likely than they are in English. For example, there is a minimal pair tykka (y is barred i) 'eat'/nykka 'dance'/-pykka 'suffer' (this one, however, never occurs without a noun incorporated). That's the largest one I've ever been able to find (and -pykka is an iffy inclusion since it never occurs in isolation). There's no kykka, kwykka, ?ykka, sykka, hykka, tsykka, mykka, ngykka, ngwykka, jykka, or wykka. With all the possibilities of root structure in Panamint, there just aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic inventory has had to be determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using permissible initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. [Robert Whiting] The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). [Me] I disagree with Robert on this one. The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the language). All phonemes do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence equally impressive. Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and unpredictability factors all point toward them being separate phonemes. While the evidence for separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as overwhelming as the evidence separating /s/ and /z/, it is still enough to compel a separation on synchronic grounds. [Pat Ryan] What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [Me] Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This is not appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the phonological or morphophonological rules are still productive. [Robert Whiting] Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' [Me] The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun into a verb by voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, e.g., 'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. Even the intervocalic voicing of /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., path [th] and paths [dh], but path's [th]. These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for these pairs. Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it in a theoretical sense. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 14 06:38:00 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 09:38:00 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>pronouns, [th] otherwise. >I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >days without anyone questioning the original statement about >complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >Arthur, etc etc. And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a language you should deal with words that are native to that language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't mentioned any of them. Basically, anything that comes from Greek theta is going to be pronounced [th] in English. Apparent exceptions like Thomas or thyme can be accounted for by tracing the path of the word into English. But even these apparent exceptions only show that [th] opposes [t], not that [th] opposes [dh]. Now if you can make a similar list of words from Greek or Latin/French where original theta is pronounced [dh] (I expect that 'rhythm' and 'logarithm' and the similar but unrelated 'algorithm' [but not 'arithmetic'] are special cases because of the -thm#) or you can show a list of words of Germanic origin where intervocalic is pronounced [th] then you would have a good point and something to look at. If not, not. Now "foreign word" is a perceptual category (just as "phoneme" is) and it is how the speaker perceives the word that decides what phonological (and sometimes morphological) rules he can expect to apply. Moreover, the perception of whether a word is foreign or not is likely to change over time (the longer a word is in the language the more likely it is to eventually be regarded as non-foreign). And once a word is considered native, then it will treated phonologically as a native word. So perhaps you are saying that [th] and [dh] are separate phonemes and intervocalic [th] is used to mark foreign words since all native words will have [dh] intervocalically. This does not sound particularly convincing to me. Let's look at what happens with words borrowed from languages that do have /dh/. Since [dh] allegedly has phonemic status in English, one would expect that they would be borrowed as [dh] just as Greek theta is borrowed as [th] (cf. borrowings with /f/ and /v/ below). But if one looks at Arabic 'dhow', although the spelling preserves the Arabic /dh/, the pronunciation is with [d], not [dh]. And so on. I know of no example where a word with /dh/ in the original has been borrowed as [dh] into English despite the frequent preservation of in the spelling, but if there are some then I would consider them as tending to indicate phonemic status for [dh] in English. But I wouldn't be convinced without minimal pairs like 'focal' - 'vocal' or 'file' - 'vile' >[dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. noun (adj.) verb life live half halve house [haws] house [hawz] glass glaze grass graze breath breathe bath bathe cloth clothe wreath writhe (wreathe) teeth (tooth) teethe loath (loth) loathe [An apparent exception is 'tithe' [noun and verb] but this is rather a fossilized form than an exception. The word originally meant "tenth" and indeed was identical with the contemporary word for "tenth" ('te:odha') with the proper intervocalic voiced [dh]. With the marginalization of the word as a special kind of "tenth", it dropped out of its word class (ordinal numbers) and did not undergo the same changes as the rest of the group, which resulted in the levelling of the category to a final [th]. Thus the pronunciation with final voiced [dh] was preserved in both noun and verb [and is also reflected in the spelling.] [Another form that falls outside the system is 'smooth' (adj.) and 'smoothe' (v.). Here, again, there is no contrast between [th] and [dh]; [dh] simply appears in an unexpected place. And while 'smooth' is ancient in English, its origin is unknown. Contrast this with 'sooth' (n.) and 'soothe' (v.).] Morphohonemic variants are generally not considered distinct phonemes in that environment. At most they are considered morphophonemes and at the least simple allophones because the distribution of sounds is goverened by rule (in this case a morphological-phonological rule) and hence the value of the sound is predictable from its environment. Morphophonemic alternation is not sufficient to establish phonemic status (although it is often a prelude to it). Morphophonemic variants may very well be phonemically distinct in other environments, but it is the basic precept of internal reconstruction that morphophonemic variants can normally be traced back to some archephoneme in the pre-language. This is one reason why unrelated words is usually a requirement for minimal pairs. >That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that >of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly >controversial view Phonemic status is easy to show for /s/ and /z/, somewhat more difficult for /f/ and /v/ (but it exists), and very difficult for [th] and [dh]. If you look at a list of English words that begin with [v] you will find very few native words ('vat' and 'vixen' are about it). But both of these are dialect borrowings in standard English replacing earlier 'fat' (vessel) and 'fyxen' (feminine of 'fox' with '-en' feminine marker and umlaut). However, modern 'fat' ("fat", cf. G. 'Fett') and 'vat' ("large vessel", cf. G. 'Fass' [scharfes s]) are clearly a minimal pair since neither is likely to be recognized as a foreign word. On the other hand, 'focal' and 'vocal' are both recognized as foreign words, but the distinction /f/-/v/ is sufficient to differentiate them. Speakers now have to recognize inherent [v] sounds in words to distinguish them from both inherent [f] sounds and from [v] as a morphophonemic variant of /f/. Therefore /f/ and /v/ are separate phonemes (almost a borrowed phonemic distinction, but made possible by the mophophonemic alternation of [f] and [v]). As for 'of' and 'off', this is a stress difference. 'Off' is simply a lexicalized stressed form of 'of' (this is why 'off of' as in "get off of the grass" is considered substandard). >("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to >hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the >Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken >as a simple fact. I dare say that most descriptions of modern English do take this as a simple fact (just as many dictionaries will tell you that pronominal determiners are pronouns) and therefore not worth investigating. But facts are not data. Data exists in nature. Facts are observations about data. Facts are a matter of interpretation and facts can be wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to go beyond surface appearances to see if the facts are correct interpretations of the data. What I want to know is what are the data on which this "simple fact" of the phonemic status of [th] and [dh] in English is based. In this case, it would seem that [th, dh] just ride along on the coattails of [s, z] and [f, v] in the belief that if [s, z] and [f, v] split then [th, dh] must have too. The creation of the allophones of original /s/, /f/, and /th/ happened for all at the same time: unvoiced spirants between voiced sounds following a stressed vowel became voiced. This did not increase the number of contrasts (phonemes), merely the number of allophones (/s/ [s, z]; /f/ [f, v]; /th/ [th, dh]). The phonemic splits came later and for different reasons. First came morphophonemic alternation followed by, for /s/ and /z/, the use of /z/ to create expressive and imitative words; for /f/ and /v/, the need to differentiate borrowed words with inherent [f] and [v]; and, for [th] and [dh] -- well, I just can't think of anything that compels the use of [th] and [dh] for making distinctions. If you can provide something, I'd be glad to listen to it. But it will have to be better than loanwords that don't contrast with anything else and morphophonemic alternations or parallelism with [s, z] and [f, v]. But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two sounds? Now English does not have the world's greatest fit between writing and sounds. The same sounds can be written with different characters and the same characters can be used to write different sounds. In some cases, there is no way to tell how certain written combinations are to be spoken. There is no rule to tell you how a word like 'cough' is to be pronounced. One simply has to learn the pronunciation with the word. But with [th] and [dh] this is not necessary, even though there is no clue in the writing (with the exception of <-e> in verbs which marks the fact that the preceding is voiced). Otherwise one would have to learn the pronunciation of every word containing separately. When dealing with phonemes, if you know the pronunciation, you can distinguish a word from all other words with similar sounds except for the different phonemes. Phonemes distinguish between words when there is no other criterion for distinguishing them and are completely arbitrary. Thus there is no rule (phonological, morphological, or syntactical) for distinguishing between /fat/ and /bat/ except the rule that says that /f/ and /b/ are different phonemes. The phonemes /f/ and /b/ don't tell you anthing about these words except that they are different. If /f/ were always used only in verbs and /b/ were always used only in nouns, then one would have to take another look at the phonemic status of /f/ and /b/. When dealing with [th] and [dh] if you recogize the word category, you will know what the sound is. You don't have to learn the pronunciation with the word except in a very few cases (like 'rhythm'). Otherwise, even for words that you may not be familiar with like 'thole' or 'wether' or 'heterochthonous' you will know whether [th] or [dh] is correct. Words such as 'blithe' which can be pronounced with either [th] or [dh] (not as a matter of stress, but simply free variation) do not speak strongly in favor of phonemic status for these two sounds (athough it doesn't necessarily speak against it either). So once again, the only native words where [th] and [dh] contrast is 'thigh' and 'thy'. 'Thy' belongs to a class of words that always has [dh] in this position. 'Thigh' belongs to a class of words (not really a significant class, merely the complement of the other class) that always has [th] in this position. The apparent opposition between [th] and [dh] in this example is just a historical accident (in much the same way that homynyms come into existence through historical accidents) since the original distinction between these words did not depend on this opposition. Thus this "minimal pair" is not adequate to establish [th] and [dh] as separate phonemes in my opinion since distribution of sounds by rule is a more important criterion even if the rules are not phonological. And again, if you have evidence for the phonemic status of [th] and [dh] in English (and I don't mean evidence that they are recognized as different sounds [phones] or that they are morphophonemic variants), I will be happy to evaluate it. I just haven't found any that I consider convincing despite the fact that most grammars will list them as separate phonemes and put forth such "minimal pairs" as 'thigh' - 'thy' or 'ether' - 'either' or 'wreath' - 'wreathe' as evidence. Now there is no reason why [th] and [dh] can't be separate phonemes in English. They might very well be. Or they might well be on their way to becoming separate phonemes. But if they are, one can reasonably expect there to be some evidence of it. If [th] and [dh] are different phonemes in English, then it is an unused phonemic distinction. And since it is unused, it can't be proved that they aren't phonemically distinct just because there is no evidenc that they are. What can be shown is that [th, dh] are allophones of /th/ that resulted from the original voicing of spirants in a voiced environment and that these allophones can be used as morphophonemic variants. But without unequivocal evidence that they are used as separate phonemes, it is safer to assume that they are not. In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find [dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that [th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 14 13:17:11 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 14:17:11 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as > a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. Speakers who retain the 'where'/'wear' contrast have different intuitions about the voiceless sound. Some -- apparently including Pete -- feel strongly that voiceless [w] is a single segment, and hence a phoneme in its own right. Others -- certainly including me -- feel equally strongly that voiceless [w] represents the cluster /hw/. As far as I'm concerned, 'whine' is phonemically /hwain/, while 'wine' is phonemically /wain/. I have had this intuition since childhood, and I still have it now, even though I recognize that I typically pronounce this /hw/ as a single phonetic segment. > My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it > certainly no longer does. Such a pronunciation would not even be > recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. But still, some people > (such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. This time it is not only intuitions, but pronunciations, which differ. In my western NY State accent, I can't possibly pronounce 'hue' with the ich-Laut. That's because, for me, the phonemic structure is not /hju:/, but rather /hIw/, where 'I' stands for small capital . For me, 'hue' and similar words do not rhyme with 'you', which is definitely /ju:/. Likewise, 'fuse' (/fIwz/) does not rhyme with the verb 'use' (/ju:z/), and so on. If I drawl these words, 'hue' and 'fuse' get a lengthened [I], while 'you' and 'use' get a lengthened [u]. I think this is typical of everybody in my area. One of my brothers is named 'Hugh', and absolutely nobody back home calls him anything but [hIw]. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:15:13 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:15:13 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 09:54 PM 4/4/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >[PR] >I would have to say that you are wrong. >There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a >component of a minimal pair. Examples have been given that show otherwise. >[PR] >I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a rule. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:24:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:24:59 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000d01bfa0b7$0cfe1260$237101d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 08:38 PM 4/6/00 +0100, petegray wrote: >Pat said: >> I think the pair when:wen is minimal for voiceless /w/. >> In 'hue', the glide belongs with the vowel, as it does in 'hew'. >Despite a number of pairs (where:wear etc) some writers deny voiceless w as >a phoneme, and analyse it as h+w, which to my ears is daft. Well, in my dialect they are identical, so the issue doesn't come up. But where they are distinct, I would indeed treat them as allophones. For one thing, English does not have rising diphthongs starting in 'w', so an analysis similar to the "hew" case is unavailable. >My dialect might originally have pronounced "hue" as /h-yu:/, but it >certainly no longer does. That is not what was claimed. Allophonic status does not really require that sort of situation. > Such a pronunciation would not even be >recognised. The consonant has to be the ich-laut. Of course it does. The ich-laut is an allophone, that means it is governed by a rule. > But still, some people >(such as Pat, who on this occasion is in good company) deny its phonemicity. I base this on several factors: - The sound ONLY occurs before a former long-u, even in Modern English. - The normal reflex of old [u:] in Modern English is [yu:]. - It is almost impossible to pronounce [h] before a [y]. Thus, it is easily treated as a synchronic rule of English pronunciation. That makes the sound an allophone of [h] in that environment - before a [y]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 14 16:12:06 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 19:12:06 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00e501bf9eaa$98dfdca0$7e14153f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: On Tue, 4 Apr, proto-language wrote: >[RW] >I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >[PR] [ moderator snip ] >There is no phoneme in any language which has not been >established as a component of a minimal pair. So what? Do you assume therefore that anything that is a component of a minimal pair is a phoneme? I know that you have said that using logic is childish, but you really ought to try it sometime. Saying that anything that occurs in a minimal pair is a phoneme because all phonemes occur in minimal pairs is like saying that anything that is black is a raven because all ravens are black. I know you won't understand what I'm talking about, but any textbook on logic will tell you that for any universal statement (all S are P) the simple converse (all P are S) is not valid. The minimum valid conversion of "all S are P" is "some P are S". [RW] >>The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English >>minimal pair >> 'thigh' / 'thy' >> (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] >> is clearly marginal) >>Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). >That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic >status for both. Yes, of course you would. I wouldn't expect you to do anything else. >>This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >>distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments >[PR] >What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? An environment that is voiced. >What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? This is a morphophonemic alternation. You can make as long a list as you want of such alternations and wherever there is a distinction between [th] and [dh], [th] will occur in a substantive and [dh] will appear in a verb that is derived from it. Very rarely, [dh] will appear also in the substantive, but it will always appear in the verb. [RW] >>and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. >[PR] >I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological >conditioning factors. And here you would have the full support of Stanley Friesen. But rules are rules, whether they are phonological, morphological, or lexical. It is just a question of how much one area of language can affect another. [RW] >>Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two >>sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a >>single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds >>can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate >>phonemes.' >[PR] >I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. Which is your strongest argument. Which is why you should be supporting my argument instead of claiming that distribution by rule is less important than minimal pairs in determining phonemicity. You don't seem to realize that, while what I have said does not directly support your position, it does give you a stronger position to argue from. I know that thinking things through is not your forte, but you really should learn to think in terms of how the various parts of a problem relate to each other. You say that the distribution of *e and *o is governed by rule and that only a minimal pair would prove their phonemic status. And I say that even a minimal pair wouldn't necessarily demonstrate their phonemicity so long as they can still be predicted by rule and then you say no, all phonemes occur in minimal pairs so anything that occurs in a minimal pair must be a phoneme. And you claim that this is a rational line of thought? But if you claim that [th] and [dh] must be phonemes because they occur as morphophonemic variants as you did above (bath, bathe), then you have lost your argument about *e and *o because they are also morphophonemic variants. Indeed, it was in part their morphophonemic alternation that led, through internal reconstruction, to the laryngeal theory. So if morphophonemic alternation (conditioned variance) demonstrates phonemicity, then *e and *o are separate phonemes. Which position do you want to support? >[RW] >>Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but >>contrastive environments are a clincher. >[PR] >I find this totally unacceptable. Yes, I can see why it would confuse you. The second part of the statement is not entirely clear. So I will try to explain it in more detail and write very slowly and distinctly. Minimal pairs is a heuristic. A heuristic is a way of finding things that might prove significant. Minimal pairs is a useful way of looking for phonemes. Now if a heuristic works regularly, people tend to start thinking of it as a law. Minimal pairs is so successful at predicting phonemes that often no further investigation is done and a minimal pair is considered a sufficient condition for phonemicity. This is the position taken by you and Stanley Friesen (and probably a lot of other people). But a lot of people also realize that minimal pairs is not a necessary condition for establishing phonemicity (I realize that you probably don't understand this stuff about "necessary" and "sufficient" conditions because it has to do with logic, but bear with me) and this is where you and Stanley part company. Now I believe that minimal pairs is not even a sufficient condition for establishing phonemicity, particularly when the number of minimal pairs is minimal. I believe that distribution of sounds by rule is more important than what may appear to be minimal pairs in determining whether two sounds are distinct phonemes or not. I also believe that the rule that determines the distribution of the sounds does not have to be phonological. This is where you and Stanley join up again, in the belief that the conditioning environment must be phonetic. What I meant by "contrastive environments" is, as I said, not entirely clear from the statement (but I'm not entirely sure that saying "non-contrasting" would have been better). What I had in mind is that the different phonemes provide the only contrast, and this contrast must be completely arbitrary for the two sounds to be separate phonemes. That is to say that the phonemes themselves can tell you nothing about the words involved except that they are different. If a sound regularly occurs only in a certain class of words and a similar but different sound regularly occurs elsewhere, then this is complementary distribution. And complementary distribution of similar sounds points to no phonemic distinction between them. If you can always predict which sound will be present from the environment, then the sounds are not different phonemes (in that environment). Phonemes should tell you nothing about words except that they are different (i.e., they shouldn't tell you that one word is a noun and the other is a verb or that one word is a pronoun and the other is not, or that one is singular and the other plural, etc.). >Show me contrastive phonological environments. Sorry, "phonological" wasn't mentioned in my statement, so you will have to provide your own. >[RW] >>As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, >>similar items that are in complementary distribution are usually >>aspects of the same thing. But believe it or not, linguists will >>still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds and different >>analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes claimed for >>a particular language. >[PR] >Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. Well, so long as you disagree with everything I say, even if you have to destroy your own arguments to do it, just because I have said it, this is doubtless true. But I wouldn't call it fate, I'd call it a conditioned reflex. I myself would have phrased it differently, and would have said that I will agree with you when you are right, but perhaps this is actually exactly the same thing that you have said. >I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional >linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. I will let you answer this one yourself because: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >Whether any given linguist did or did not accept the validity of >my studies is not a proof or disproof of my work. Now here is something that I can agree with you on. Who agrees or disagrees with a theory is not proof pro or con. Who makes a statement does not affect its validity. Who proposes or accepts the theory is immaterial. It matters not whether the proponent of a theory is well or poorly educated, is a "professional linguist" (PL) or a known crackpot (not necessarily different things), has been convicted of income tax evasion, or wets the bed. All that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. A theory is not automatically wrong because it is proposed by Patrick Ryan, and it is not automatically correct because it is proposed by a PL. So whether a PL agrees with your ideas or not is irrelevant, as you yourself pointed out on 27 May 1999. Obviously PL's are not automatically correct in your mind or you wouldn't be telling PL's that they are wrong on a daily basis. If PL's are always right, then citing a PL is a good argument, but if they are only right when they agree with you and wrong otherwise, it rather vitiates your appeal to the authority of an unnamed "professional linguist". This doesn't mean that you are wrong though; it just means that it isn't a valid argument. And all that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 15 09:05:16 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2000 12:05:16 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000d01bfa0b7$0cfe1260$237101d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, petegray wrote: > Hence my point that minimal pairs are not a sufficient criterion - we > also actually make decisions on the basis of a theoretical structure > into which potential phonemes fit. For a while I was beginning to think that I was the only one who believed this. Analysis does not stop with a minimal pair. Minimal pairs is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for establishing phonemicity. Minimal pairs is just a useful heuristic for locating probable phonemes. But it is useful because it is usually accurate. A minimal pair that does not indicate phonemicity has to have a good explanation. And there are doubtless cases where minimal pairs still exist in parts of the language even though phonemicity of the sounds is being lost through phonemic merger. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 03:36:18 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 22:36:18 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 4:55 AM [SG] The issue at issue is the number and nature of vowel phonemes present in the ("Balochi"; in English, Baluchi) language. It is identical to that of Sanskrit: a, i, i, a:, i:, u:, e, o (the latter two inherently long). As far as I remember you categorically denied the possibility that such a system could exist. Now, it does, which removes every further claim you are building or trying to build on this unsubstantiated claim. [PR] There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, is it not? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 14 08:46:08 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:46:08 GMT Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Perhaps PIE /e/ and /o/ were once allophones, but afterwards analogical effects messed it up. If it was /o/ only after the stress, so explaining e.g. the /o/ in verb perfects such as {leloiqw-} = "(he) has left" , the /o/ in {woid-} might be the result of analogy. Likewise with English /th/ versus /dh/: the pronunciation /dh/ spread from unstressed pronouns to the same pronouns pronounced stressed in emphasis. And I have noticed another minimal pair of English /th/ versus /dh/: {thou} /dhau/ = "you" (sg.) :: {thou} /thau/ = engineering slang for "a thousandth of an inch". From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 14 15:34:56 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:34:56 -0700 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <005e01bfa29e$d40b3520$64c71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:42 PM 4/9/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Jens and IEists: >[PR] >To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >support with some reservations: >"After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >/e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the >chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >formerly received a secondary pitch accent." Yes, this is one suggested explanation, one I find less than convincing, as I find few, if any, well-attested examples of this sort of sound change. However, even *assuming* it is the correct model, it still leaves the e/o distinction phonemic in PIE! Lehmann here is discussing the *loss* of a conditioning factor as the basis for the sound change. That is the very definition of a phonemic split, similar to the s/z and th/dh splits in English. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Apr 18 03:59:16 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 21:59:16 -0600 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Someonw wrote: >>> Hyeug - to yoke. >> I am not sure why you reconstruct an initial laryngeal. Peter replied: >I have been hunting through my notes, and I'm not sure now either! >I picked it up from somewhere, without keeping a record of who suggested it. >I only have a note that Sanskrit occasionally has a long augment before this >root a:yunak, and a reference to the Greek development in /dzugon/, which >one or two people have suggested shows an initial Hy cluster (#Hy > /dz/, >#y > /h/). And my Sanskrit books show no sign of a long augment! For what it's worth, several scholars of the dim dark past have proposed that PIE y- yielded Greek ([z] or [dz]?), while Hy- yielded [h-] (rough breathing), provided that the laryngeal was voiceless. For discussion and analysis see Lehman, PIEP, 74ff. I think this development is phonetically more plausible: the voiced resonant remains voiced, the voiceless laryngeal devoices the y-. But please: the evidence is fairly scanty, and I cannot say that I accept this as fact. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 14 12:49:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 07:49:51 -0500 Subject: "lumpers" Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:54 PM > Perhaps we really need to distinguish between those "lumpers" who only > publish working papers with possibly suggestive and unsifted data (Greenberg, > et al.) and those who publish finished proofs with well-analyzed and > evaluated data. [PR] I think this characterizes the situation perfectly, Nonetheless, I think into which camp Greenberg should be placed may be affected by a reading of his recent _Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives_, which I find a significant advance over what he has written before. In it, he compares morphology among many reputedly related language-families in a, IMHO, thoroughly believable way. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Apr 16 01:59:45 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2000 21:59:45 -0400 Subject: "lumpers" - in defence of Ruhlen Message-ID: There is actually a work by Ruhlen dating from the 70's, which, while open to substantal criticism, is absoutely unexceptionable from the scholarly point of view: Ruhlen, Merrit. 1978. "Nasal Vowels". Joseph Greenberg, ed. Universals of Human Language. 2. Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 203-41. Robert Orr >While I have not had the pleasure of meeting the others named by Mr. Holm, I >studied Anatolian linguistics with Prof. Shevoroshkin for an entire semester. >Although I was not interested in the (Illic^-Svityc^) Nostratic etymologies >proposed for various difficult Lycian, Lydian, or Carian items, my overall >impression of him was positive: He clearly is an excellent linguist with a >strong grasp of the methodologies of historical linguistics. >I would not even rule out a work associated with Mr. Ruhlen without at least a >cursory examination. I daresay most list members are as tolerant as I... > Rich Alderson From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Apr 14 13:20:11 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 08:20:11 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Lehmann, in his Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, p. 107, attributes the term to a Semiticist, Hermann Moeller, in 1879. He mentions only a note and does not give a citation. Herb Stahlke >>> mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk 04/11/00 10:56AM >>> When was the word "laryngeal" first given to these sounds? The name seems to show an idea by someone that these sounds were pronounced in that sort of area of the mouth and throat. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Apr 17 09:16:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 12:16:42 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote] > I believe the IE loan words that show laryngeal reflexes in Uralic may > tell something about the phonetic values of laryngeals. [...] [Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen] > I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves, and make very good > sense typologically as well. [...] > The set [h], [x], [{ghw}] is very close to Dutch which has [h], [x] and > [{gh}], while in many languages gamma is rounded, cf., e.g., the > development underlying the orthography of English law, corresponding to > Danish lov (Swedish lag). I have therefore bee preaching this set for > quite many years (on record since 1982, I see), often against heavy > criticism. I now see the very same set advocated, without explicit > reasons, in Meier-Bru"gger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Has the > gospel been heard? At any rate, the agreement is nice to see. As regards Uralic, your *H2 = [x] and *H3 = *[Yw] (I suppose you mean a voiced fricative with {gh}) seem to work well. PIE *H3 = [Yw] > PU *x = [Y] makes sense. There is no known example of *H3 > PU retroflex *S, and if the sound value [Yw] is correctly reconstructed, it is predictable that there aren't any - a substitution [Yw] > [S] is certainly not possible. But there's a problem with *H1 as [h] from an Uralic point of view. There are quite a few loan words with *H1 > PU *S. A substitution [x] > retroflex [S] is phonetically sensible, given that the system in the receiving language doesn't have an unvoiced velar fricative or [h] - parallels are known. But [h] > [S] seems impossible in any circumstance. One would rather expect [h] > [k] or even [h] > zero. But then again, I guess it is not necessarily the case that the sound values of the laryngeals remained the same in all the daughter languages before they disappeared. The cases with IE *H1 > U *S seem to be Pre-Baltic and Pre-Germanic. I have also entertained the thought that there may be one loan word which points to a palatal(ized) value of *H1. PU *s?ijili 'hedgehog' might derive from PIE *H1eg?hi-l- (> German Igel). But this etymology must be considered uncertain since no parallel cases for PIE *H1 > PU *s? have been found. __________ Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Apr 14 14:16:41 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 17:16:41 +0300 Subject: Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] >The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of >contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as >for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as >you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too. [Rick Mc Callister:] >Can you elaborate on Germanic-Uralic contacts? >Are you only talking about Scandinavian or all Germanic? Proto-Germanic and Pre-Germanic. Both Finnish and Saami have Germanic loan words borrowed before e.g. PGerm. *ee > NWGerm. *aa. There are also Germ. loan words predating e.g. the Proto-Finnic changes *ti > *si and *c?c? > *ts, which took place very early, probably 3000+ years BP (see below). Saami and Finnish also have shared PG loan words, which must thus be at least about 3000 years old, e.g. Finn. k?rsi- 'suffer', Saami gierda- 'sustain' < *k?rti- < PG *xardhia- 'harden' Finn. kats-o- 'look', kaitse- 'look after', Saami geahc^c^a- 'look' < *kac?c?i- < PG *gaatja- 'look after etc.' As for Pre-Germanic, there are loan words which point to retained laryngals and the derivative in question appears only in Germanic, e.g. Finn. rehto 'row' < *reSto < Pre-G *rH1-t?- (> PG *radha-) Finn. lehti, Saami lasta 'leaf' < *leSti < Pre-G *blH1-t?- (> PG *bladha-) Finn. rohto 'herb' < *roSto < Pre-G *ghr?H-to- (> PG *grootha-) For more on the subject, I recommend Jorma Koivulehto's book "Verba Mutuata" (M?moires de la Soci?t? Finno-Ougrienne #237), which contains 16 articles (some 450 pages in total) by him, dealing with IE-U contacts and focusing mostly on Finnic and Germanic. __________ Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Apr 14 14:46:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 17:46:40 +0300 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [The original suggestion was that Tocharian *wesa 'gold' (A w?s, B yasa) was borrowed from Proto-Samoyedic *wes? 'metal, iron'.] [I wrote:] >So, Samoyed *wes? ~ Tocharian *wesa seems like chance correspondence. But, >assuming that the Toch. form requires an irregular (?) metathesis, the loan >etymology perhaps remains as a(n unlikely) possibility? >> [Joat Simeon] > -- I suppose it could have been a Tocharian-Samoyed loan? This would be very unlikely, since then it would have to be of another origin than its widely attested cognates elsewhere in Uralic (Finnish vaski etc.). It was recently pointed out to me in private correspondence that the development IE *H2eus- > Tocharian *wesa required by the suggested IE etymology would be quite exceptional. And I was not aware that the same loan etymology had already been suggested by Fredrik Kortlandt (in "Eight Indo-Uralic verbs?", M?nchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 50). He takes the view that the IE etymology of Toch. *wesa is phonetically impossible and the word must be a Samoyed loan. In this light, I am inclined to think that this is indeed the case and *wesa is not etymologically linked with Latin aurum etc. Regards, Ante Aikio From promotion at benjamins.com Sat Apr 22 17:04:23 2000 From: promotion at benjamins.com (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 13:04:23 -0400 Subject: New Books: Indo-European: Smith, Sihler Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing announces the availability of the following new works: Historical Linguistics 1995. Volume 1: General issues and non-Germanic Languages. Selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Manchester, August 1995. John Charles SMITH and Delia BENTLEY (eds.) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 161 US & Canada: 1 55619 877 9 / USD 100.00 (Hardcover) Rest of World: 90 272 3666 6 / NLG 200.00 (Hardcover) This volume contains papers on general issues of language change, as well as specific studies of non-Germanic languages, including Romance, Slavonic, Japanese, Australian languages, and early Indo-European. A second volume, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, will contain papers on Germanic. Contributions by: Jean-Luc Azra; Vit Buben?k; Michela Cennamo; Alan Dench; Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis & Mireille Tremblay; Denis Dumas; Anthony Fox; Bjarke Frellesvig; Anna Giacalone Ramat; Peter Hendriks; Alan Hyun-Oak Kim; Leonid I. Kulikov; Paul M. Lloyd; Christopher Lyons; Maria M. 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This book should be a useful guide for anyone unfamiliar with (historical) linguistics who is studying the history of a language, and also for those who are enrolled in courses devoted to reading texts in old languages. Contents: Introduction; Changes in Pronunciation; Sound Laws; Analogy; Semantic Change; Reconstruction; External Aspects of Language; The Interpretation of Written Records; Appendix: Phonetics - the mechanisms of speech and the classifications of speech sounds; Glossary; Glossary of Terms in German; Bibliography; Index. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6762325 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 21 17:06:54 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 18:06:54 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Jens said: >I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves ... A voiced value of >/H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; Steady on! This word is far from clear, and is, I believe, the only evidence for voicing in H3. Can we really construct our theories on one isolated unclear word? Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 22 16:00:15 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 18:00:15 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: [...] > But > there's a problem with *H1 as [h] from an Uralic point of view. There > are quite a few loan words with *H1 > PU *S. A substitution [x] > > retroflex [S] is phonetically sensible, given that the system in the > receiving language doesn't have an unvoiced velar fricative or [h] - > parallels are known. But [h] > [S] seems impossible in any circumstance. > One would rather expect [h] > [k] or even [h] > zero. > But then again, I guess it is not necessarily the case that the sound > values of the laryngeals remained the same in all the daughter languages > before they disappeared. The cases with IE *H1 > U *S seem to be > Pre-Baltic and Pre-Germanic. > I have also entertained the thought that there may be one loan word which > points to a palatal(ized) value of *H1. PU *s?ijili 'hedgehog' might > derive from PIE *H1eg?hi-l- (> German Igel). But this etymology must be > considered uncertain since no parallel cases for PIE *H1 > PU *s? have > been found. While one should of course be cautious about sweeping statements straddling millennia, I have some worries with an Ich-Laut for *H1. First, could a palatal spirant really avoid triggering a vowel (by svarabhakti or otherwise) in the position after non-initial stops if both of the back spirants *H2 and *H3 do produce one? Second, would its vocalization product (by svarabhakti or direct vocalization) really by a centralized vowel? Third, the reflexes of H1 and H2 do not follow anything remotely reminiscent of the satem/centum isogloss. Fourth, if people are crying for an /h/ because there are aspirates, isn't this our chance to given them one? Even so, I cannot dismiss your suggestion of phonetic variation - that could even have been there from the start, meaning that [h] may be just one of the manifestations of /H1/, which would still leave room for [x^] being another. I do not believe phonetic typology has reached a point enabling it to exclude any such thing. And incidentally, the Greek reflexes of CRH1C with /-Re:-/ are easier to udnerstand from [x^] than from [h], since the latter would simply add voicelessness, but not redirect the articulation to any other location than where the sonants are themselves - and they all produce [a] when given an undisturbed course. But also FU should be kept open for interpretation in terms of variation. I have always tended to see the substitution of sh-sounds for h and the Finnish development of sh to h in the light of the Swedish pronunciation of sj which varies a huge lot and certainly includes sounds that would qualify excellently as substitutes for [h] if the language did not have that already. Is it possible that the development of sh to h had begun, on a limited scale, in Proto-FU already, so that a foreign [h] could be perceived as a (substandard) manifestation of an sh-like sound? That would be a story much like the Russian g for h. For what it's worth, I think the equation of siili and Igel is brilliant. Regards, Jens From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Apr 21 09:38:31 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:38:31 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <010901bfa5c2$98ebec60$2ac71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >[PR] >There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no >language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ >is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. >This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious >that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, >is it not? In diachronic terms, you are right, with the tiny (and picky) amendment that the Balochi vowels are not derived from an "early Sanskrit" source, since Balochi happens to be an Iranian language rather than an Indic one. -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 22:07:07 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 17:07:07 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 10:34 AM > At 10:42 PM 4/9/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >> Dear Jens and IEists: >> [PRp] >> To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >> change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >> phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >> support with some reservations: >> "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >> /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when >> the chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >> formerly received a secondary pitch accent." [SF] > Yes, this is one suggested explanation, one I find less than convincing, > as I find few, if any, well-attested examples of this sort of sound change. > However, even *assuming* it is the correct model, it still leaves the e/o > distinction phonemic in PIE! Lehmann here is discussing the *loss* of a > conditioning factor as the basis for the sound change. That is the very > definition of a phonemic split, similar to the s/z and th/dh splits in > English. [PR] Essentially, I agree with you. Rightly or wrongly, however, I favor basically Trask's definition with qualifications: "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning"; the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but that 'ether/either' does. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 22 14:59:07 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:59:07 +0200 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut In-Reply-To: <005e01bfa29e$d40b3520$64c71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: Dear Pat and anyone, I am truly grateful for the very explicitly critical reply to my mail, for it gives me occasion to comment on some points that appear to have become common heritage in the field of IE, even though the basis for them appears slender or non-existing. I have a problem, however, with dragging named authorities into this; do we have a right to bother third party just because _we_ cannot come to an agreement? Still, the literature is there, and for this very purpose. So, if our moderator permits, I'll react to your posting in full. On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, proto-language wrote: > Dear Jens and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" > Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:54 PM >>>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote: > > [PR] > To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported > change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged > phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I > support with some reservations: > "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ > /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the > chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented > formerly received a secondary pitch accent." That is not what we find. It may be a popular guess about the unknowable, but, as far as observations _can_ be made, they are very potently against it. This is not ad hoc, it's rather contra hoc. I could understand that a de-accented /e/ turned into /o/ if all unaccented /e/'s became /o/ (as I think they did at one point), but the next step for all would be to go on to zero (as I believe they in fact did). Surely, this cannot explain IE "o-grade", except for the plain cases where lengthening has occurred, so that we get, e.g., *-e':n vs. *'-o:n from accented *-e'n-s and unaccented *'-en-s respectively. The rule is completely inadequate to account for an alternation between accented o and zero (as in the perfect), nor does it tell us why the pretonic -o- of the causative has not been lost. > Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended > by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question > like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, > may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I > understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive > feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. Agreed, and now it's happening, in both directions. Too bad that suprasegmentals are not being conveyed on the list, but my "When will you ever learn?" was meant with a ring of sarcasm, potentially against myself - meaning "How long can I go on disagreeing with everybody?" As opinions stand, it seems to be the facts that ought to give in: I am still waiting for solid evidence favoring the most popular views about ablaut; when will the IE languages ever learn how they are supposed to be? > Lehmann's position is maintained more recently (1993) in his _Theoretical > Bases of Indo-European Linguistics_, where he writes on page 131: > "Deflected grade is explained by loss of primary accent on a vowel and > replacement by a secondary accent. If in derivation the accent fell on an > affix rather than on the root, the root vowel under such secondary accent > changed to o, as in Greek nomo's "pasture," nomeu's "shepherd" in contrast > with the vowel of the accented root in the verb ne'mo: "I pasture". If there are two types to'mos and tomo's, it cannot be the accent that caused any of the syllables to assume the vocalism /o/. If the cited rule were correct, there should be -o- and not zero grade in the to-participle, and an u-stem like *pe'r-tu-s (ON fjordr) should alternate with **por-te'w- and not with *pr.-te'w- (Eng. ford, Welsh rhyd, Avest. p at r@tu-; ambiguous only Lat. portus). I find the explanation by a "secondary accent" wholly circular; there is no other evidence for such a secondary accent than the o-vocalism it is supposed to explain. And zero-grade appears under the very same circumstances - so the -o- looks like something that has a reason _different_ from the changes that led to zero. > Though Jens may assert correctly that I personally am not as familiar with > the literature as he is, I sincerely doubt whether Jens would be justified > in asserting the same for Professor Lehmann. Hey, I never expressed an opinion about your familiarity with the literature, nor would I find it pertinent to the matter: Mine isn't perfect, and where I know it, it doesn't always help much. > [JR] >> I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the >> /o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; > [PR] > Perfect > As Lehmann sees it, *o' is the result of a secondary tone-accent of a > stress- and tone-accent stage that was preceded by stress-accent stage. > During the combined stress- and tone-accent stage, a hypothetical perfect 1. > p. s. *we'id-eH(2) would have become, in the plural, 1. p. p. *wid-me', with > the full- and zero-grades being the result of the stress-accent while the > tone-accents (marked by ') shifted from the root-syllable to the affix. > As is well known, the perfect "often, but not always, had reduplication". > Therefore, the easiest explanation for the *o of the attested *wo'id-eH(2) > is to assume that it is the simplification of an originally reduplicated > form: *we'-woid-eH(2) with the reduplicating syllable receiving the primary > tone-accent and root-syllable receiving a secondary tone-accent, analogous > with *de'-dork-eH(2) [Greek de'dorka]. Greek verbal accent is non-original, all finite verb forms being accented as early as the laws of limitation permit. In languages reflecting a free accent in continuations of the perfect (Vedic, Germanic, Hittite) the -o- is accented. Note also that corrected *de-do'rk^-H2e cannot have its -o- explained from an earlier form with accent on the reduplication, for in such cases the language itself tells us that the rest of the verbal body is reduced to zero-grade, cf. Vedic 3pl prs. da'dhati from *dhe'-dhH1-n.ti. Theoretically, one could imagine that the -o- of the perfect was earlier unaccented, and only _got_ accented in a relatively late period, namely after the reduction of e to o, but before the further reduction to zero; in that case the intermediate stage o would be preserved. I believe that actually happened in a few cases, but the scenario become unnecessarily complicated with the perfect, and it divorces the explanation of the o/zero ablaut of the perfect from that of other reduplicated categories. > [JR] >> the same goes for the >> intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has >> o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). > [PR] > In Beekes, I see no *o-vocalism in intensive reduplication (*we'r-w(e)rt-, > 'to turn'; and I am not familiar with the IE reduplicated aorist (Beekes > lists only three types: stem, thematic, and sigmatic) --- could you give an > example? I don't know why Beekes writes "-(e)-" here; I wouldn't (Beekes also writes v instead of his usual w in this example, so maybe we should not overinterpret every fine point here). The expected *-o- is posited e.g. in the book on the subject by Christiane Schaefer, Das Intensivum im Vedischen, and in LIV. The assumption of *-o- is based on the lack of palatalization in Indo-Iranian (Ved. carkarmi, janghanti) and the existence of an apparent "primary present with o-grade" elsewhere which can hardly be anything but a dereduplicated continuation of this category, given the special semantic specification spelled out by Hiersche as "Bezeichnungen wiederholter und angestrengter physischer Taetigkeit" (IF 68, 1963, 157). As I claim to have shown myself, the Balto-Slavic examples treat root-final laryngeals in a way that reveals the one-time presence of reduplication in what is now Lith. ba'rti 'scold', ka'lti 'forge', ma'lti 'grind' and their Latvian and Slavic counterparts. I also believe I have shown the Hitt. verb asa:si, 3pl asesanzi 'colonize' to be an old intensive, levelled from *asa:si, *e:sanzi (by generalization of /as-/) from *H1s-H1o's-ti/*H1e's-H1s-n.ti (passed to the hi-conjugation because of the *-o-). This is precious in showing vowel gradation in the reduplication also, a structure reappearing in the Arm. nominal derivative karkut 'hail' from *gr.-gro'Hd- (via *karkrut) from the root of Slav. gradU 'hail', Lith. gru'odas. - The reduplicated aorist is mostly thematic and so has zero-grade, as in Ved. avocat, Gk. ei^pon (IE *we'-w{kw}-e/o-), but there are a number of athematic forms in Vedic, e.g. aji:gar 1. 'awoke', 2. 'devoured' from two different IE verbs, 1 *H1gi-H1go'r-t, 2 *{gw}i-{gw}o'rH3-t, again with lack of palatalization before the *-o-. > As for reduplicated presents, I cannot put my finger on an example without a > final root laryngeal, which complicates the pictures. But if you have an > example of root *Ce'C- and reduplicated present: *Ce'CoC-, the same > explanation as above for the perfect could be applied. I do not particularly advocate the reconstruction of -o- in the normal reduplicated present, but I know some that do, and I have very little to prove them wrong with. I rather believe the dissimilation in reduplications that changed *wert-wert- into *wert-wort- and further into either *we-wort- (pf.) or *wr.-wort- (intens.) was a spontaneous rather than a regular event of phonetic change. But the main point of the issue is that the -o- is here accented. > [JR] >> unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, > [PR] > We are, if Lehmann is correct, dealing with *two* phenomena: 1) changes > brought about by tone-accent shifts; and 2) changes brought about by > stress-accent shifts. My question will have to be: How can anyone know that? And how could old forms avoid being hit by later changes? That appears to me to be such a great obstacle to all theories I have seen that one will have to rank it as lethal. > Without specifying exactly which you have in mind, statements become > problematical to interpret. I avoid all such problems by not pronouncing a verdict about points for which there is no evidence, and especially of course if there _is_ evidence to the contrary. > [JR] >> cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc. >> *H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an >> optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like >> *'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s; >> ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is >> *se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other >> examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. > [PR] > That is exactly what we should expect as a result of the shift of > stress-accent from *e. Didn't somebody say this should end up being /o/? > [JR] >> However, lengthened /e:/ does >> alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to >> *swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem >> eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if >> the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not >> by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply >> unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their >> accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. > [PR] > I find the "contrast" between "deaccented" and "simply unaccented" > unconvincing based on the examples given since the data could be explained > as simply as due to the different times during which the compounds were > formed: lime:'n at a time when the affix was stress-accented; a'kmo:n at a > time when secondary tonal accent produced *o. What seems important from the > examples is that the affix -*men at one time had both the stress- and > tone-accents. Also, in the case of *swe'so:r, a component of *ser-, > 'female', has been proposed (see Pokorny p. 911, under 4. *ser-). Look good, it's not me that's making a distinction between deaccented and unaccented. In my algebra, unaccented vowels are treated the same, irrespective of the morphological status of the segments they are part of, just as good phonetic rules ought to work. > [JR] >> The route to this /o:/ >> must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening >> induced by the nominative marker file://-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing >> but the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. > [PR] > Frankly, lengthened variants of reduced vowels need a swipe of Occam's > razor. The razor would either leave them unreduced or unlengthened; the former option would yield unaccented /-e:-/, the latter zero; we find unaccented /-o:-/. Occam shouldn't be allowed to produce wrong results. > [JR] >> In stems with underlying long >> vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom. >> *po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but >> acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of >> the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the >> /-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction. > [PR] > Well, this explanation does not explain Latin pe:s very well. And the > situation of *de/e:m-/*do/o:m- is so fluid that another example would surely > be better. pe:s does not match Gk. pous anyway, nor English foot. Since the weak cases apparently have /-e-/, an alternation po:d-/pod-/ped- could easily be levelled to pe:d-/ped-. But of course the explanation cannot be better than the material it is based on, in this case Schindler's sifting of the IE root-noun types, this being his "acrostatic" o/e type. Note that the types were established without any theory about their phonological prehistory, a part I have only added later. It should be assessed as a very positive point that purely descriptive results like Schindler's have proved open to a consistent phonological analysis without any change. > [JR] >> - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic >> vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the >> accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what >> follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but >> plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way: >> /e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form >> before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you >> look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced >> segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s >> of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in >> the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have >> been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme. > [PR] > I would gladly grant the IE *-s (2. p. sing.), which I derive from earlier > /s[h]o/ has a different origin from nominative *-s, which I derive from > earlier /so/. > But I cannot accept that voicing of a root-final obstruent determines the > quality of the root-vowel --- at least, consistently, for we have *pe/e:d- > and *de/e:m- alongside *po/o:d- and *do/o:m-. It does not influence the root vowel, only the "thematic vowel", i.e. a vowel in suffix-final position. This must be a junctural phenomenon, for a suffix-final consonant has no such influence on a preceding vowel of the suffix itself, cf. gen. in *-te'y-s or *-me'n-s. It only works _across_ the boundary between suffix and flexive, or (in the case of absence of a flexive) across word-boundaries. That's not my discovery, Saussure saw it already, I only added the rules. > [JR] >> - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the >> causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very >> great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the >> /-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e. >> an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper, >> developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic >> complementary distribution). > [PR] > It is the firmest of my beliefs that IE had *no* infixes. An only apparent > exception is the *metathesized* -n- in certain present stems. We agree if I may derive my o-infix from an old prefix that got metathesized (most of the time, i.e. whenever the root did not begin with *r- in which case the o- appears prefixed). IE apparently had no prefixes either, so it may in origin be a compositional member, a deictic stem making an adjectival compound with the following stem. The phonetics would be the same. > [JR] >> It is only in such forms that we find >> "laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule, >> because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and >> found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer >> any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a >> phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen >> as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where >> there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were >> fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus. >> *mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the >> ablaut worked. > [PR] > A rather complicated solution when Lehmann's simple solution is at hand: > *me'n- + *e'ye- -> *mone'ye-. That is not simple, for it does not explain the difference it is supposed to account for, viz. -o- vs. zero: Why did this not give **mne'ye-, if *me'n- + *-to'- gave *mn.to'-? Rules are supposed to work for all forms present in a language at the time, not just for some. > [JR] >> These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of >> examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their >> actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is >> shifted away from it". When will you ever learn? > [PR] > And when will you cease patronizing condescension? Yeah, that was uncalled-for; I'm working on it. Jens From sarima at friesen.net Fri Apr 21 14:19:41 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 07:19:41 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:38 AM 4/14/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: >>... pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >>Arthur, etc etc. >And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of >loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on >native English phonology. All of the listed words are old loans, and are fully Anglicized. They are no longer perceived as "foreign" by the majority of speakers. Thus they are indeed quite relevant to the *current* phonemic status of the sounds they include. > Loan words do not necessarily follow >the phonological rules of the borrowing language. Only before they are nativized. Once nativized, they become relevant. > In fact this >is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it >doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell >that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. 'Padre' is still perceived as a Spanish word in English. Few even know that 'authority' is NOT originally a native word. >> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc >These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. And in all of your examples the two sounds are phonemically distinct. That is /s/-/z/, and /f/-/v/ are good phoneme pairs, so this is not an argument for denying /dh/ phonemic status. Also, I am not sure I would allow word derivation processes to use NON-phonemic changes. The very fact that a sound difference can be used in word derivation is, to my mind, evidence that the difference is in fact phonemic. >But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find >something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible >for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of >as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the >graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two >sounds? In the same way that Hebrew can get by with a writing system that does not represent most vowels, and the same way Mycenian Greek could get by with a syllabic writing system that failed to represent the pronunciation of the language. Answer: a native speaker has the vocabulary *memorized*, so they *know* which words are pronounced which way, and read that *into* the written word. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 21 17:20:41 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:20:41 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <00f801bfa5c1$17fb9ca0$2ac71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [Pat Ryan wrote] > In my travels around the country, > I have heard a number of pronunciations > including /hjuw/; in fact. The only time > I can remember /g/, the palatal dorsal spirant, is > here in the > South: /g|/. I've heard it throughout the West as well. My eight-year-old just said it in response to the question, "How would you tell me that something is really, really big?" "It's huge" [c-cedilla). She's never lived in the south. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Apr 21 20:30:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 15:30:44 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I haven't seen much in the way of dialect differences with dh/th but a possible anomaly is which in most of the US I've heard pronounced /blayTH/ but in the South [south of the /griysi-griyzi/ line] I usually hear it as /blayDH/. I've heard /wIDH/ as an allophone of /wITH/ in many places in the US and off the top of my head can't pin it down to one place. [snip] >These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > noun (adj.) verb [snip] Why the exception for pronouns, pronominal adjectives/deictics? >In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native >English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic >word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a >voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a >loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find >[dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a >noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that >[th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they >mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment >that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 21 16:47:00 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 17:47:00 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>[dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc A thought: If an English speaker is presented with a new word pronounced with /V:dh/ at the end, does she or he hear it as a verb? And would he or she make the similar form ending /Vth/ into the corresponding noun? Apart from wild guesses, does anyone happen to know of any evidence? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 20:37:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 15:37:29 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Bob and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 1:38 AM > On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: > At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. >> I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >> days without anyone questioning the original statement about >> complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >> which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >> pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >> examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >> find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >> Arthur, etc etc. > And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of > loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on > native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow > the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this > is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it > doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell > that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I > was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps > I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone > knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a > language you should deal with words that are native to that > language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your > list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that > have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a > loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary > distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't > mentioned any of them. > Basically, anything that comes from Greek theta is going to be > pronounced [th] in English. Apparent exceptions like Thomas or > thyme can be accounted for by tracing the path of the word into > English. But even these apparent exceptions only show that [th] > opposes [t], not that [th] opposes [dh]. Now if you can make a > similar list of words from Greek or Latin/French where original > theta is pronounced [dh] (I expect that 'rhythm' and 'logarithm' > and the similar but unrelated 'algorithm' [but not 'arithmetic'] > are special cases because of the -thm#) or you can show a list of > words of Germanic origin where intervocalic is pronounced > [th] then you would have a good point and something to look at. > If not, not. > Now "foreign word" is a perceptual category (just as "phoneme" > is) and it is how the speaker perceives the word that decides > what phonological (and sometimes morphological) rules he can > expect to apply. Moreover, the perception of whether a word is > foreign or not is likely to change over time (the longer a word > is in the language the more likely it is to eventually be > regarded as non-foreign). And once a word is considered native, > then it will treated phonologically as a native word. [PR] If I understand you correctly, we should anticipate that 'Athens' will eventually be pronounced /adhNz/. When do you expect that development? 'Athens' has been around for quite a while. Also, I doubt if one person in a hundred, outside of this list or a similar one, would identify 'ether' as a 'foreign' word. How have you (or has someone else) established that native unsophisticated speakers of English apply one set of rules to 'native' and another to 'foreign' words, and maintain a discrete category of 'foreign' words distinguished from 'native' words? [RW] > So perhaps > you are saying that [th] and [dh] are separate phonemes and > intervocalic [th] is used to mark foreign words since all native > words will have [dh] intervocalically. This does not sound > particularly convincing to me. > Let's look at what happens with words borrowed from languages > that do have /dh/. Since [dh] allegedly has phonemic status in > English, one would expect that they would be borrowed as [dh] > just as Greek theta is borrowed as [th] (cf. borrowings with /f/ > and /v/ below). But if one looks at Arabic 'dhow', although the > spelling preserves the Arabic /dh/, the pronunciation is with > [d], not [dh]. And so on. I know of no example where a word > with /dh/ in the original has been borrowed as [dh] into English > despite the frequent preservation of in the spelling, but if > there are some then I would consider them as tending to indicate > phonemic status for [dh] in English. But I wouldn't be convinced > without minimal pairs like 'focal' - 'vocal' or 'file' - 'vile' >> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc > These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs > from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > noun (adj.) verb > life live > half halve > house [haws] house [hawz] > glass glaze > grass graze > breath breathe > bath bathe > cloth clothe > wreath writhe (wreathe) > teeth (tooth) teethe > loath (loth) loathe > [An apparent exception is 'tithe' [noun and verb] but this is > rather a fossilized form than an exception. The word > originally meant "tenth" and indeed was identical with the > contemporary word for "tenth" ('te:odha') with the proper > intervocalic voiced [dh]. With the marginalization of the word > as a special kind of "tenth", it dropped out of its word class > (ordinal numbers) and did not undergo the same changes as the > rest of the group, which resulted in the levelling of the > category to a final [th]. Thus the pronunciation with final > voiced [dh] was preserved in both noun and verb [and is also > reflected in the spelling.] > [Another form that falls outside the system is 'smooth' (adj.) > and 'smoothe' (v.). Here, again, there is no contrast between > [th] and [dh]; [dh] simply appears in an unexpected place. And > while 'smooth' is ancient in English, its origin is unknown. > Contrast this with 'sooth' (n.) and 'soothe' (v.).] > Morphophonemic variants are generally not considered distinct > phonemes in that environment. At most they are considered > morphophonemes and at the least simple allophones because the > distribution of sounds is governed by rule (in this case a > morphological-phonological rule) and hence the value of the sound > is predictable from its environment. Morphophonemic alternation > is not sufficient to establish phonemic status (although it is > often a prelude to it). Morphophonemic variants may very well be > phonemically distinct in other environments, but it is the basic > precept of internal reconstruction that morphophonemic variants > can normally be traced back to some archephoneme in the > pre-language. This is one reason why unrelated words is usually > a requirement for minimal pairs. [PR] Good point, that seems to be overlooked. [RW] >> That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that >> of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly >> controversial view > Phonemic status is easy to show for /s/ and /z/, somewhat more > difficult for /f/ and /v/ (but it exists), and very difficult for > [th] and [dh]. > If you look at a list of English words that begin with [v] you > will find very few native words ('vat' and 'vixen' are about it). > But both of these are dialect borrowings in standard English > replacing earlier 'fat' (vessel) and 'fyxen' (feminine of 'fox' > with '-en' feminine marker and umlaut). However, modern 'fat' > ("fat", cf. G. 'Fett') and 'vat' ("large vessel", cf. G. 'Fass' > [scharfes s]) are clearly a minimal pair since neither is likely > to be recognized as a foreign word. On the other hand, 'focal' > and 'vocal' are both recognized as foreign words, but the > distinction /f/-/v/ is sufficient to differentiate them. [PR] I dispute whether the average person would consider /voist/ ('voiced') a *foreign* word as opposed to /foist/('foist'). [RW] > Speakers now have to recognize inherent [v] sounds in words to > distinguish them from both inherent [f] sounds and from [v] as a > morphophonemic variant of /f/. Therefore /f/ and /v/ are separate > phonemes (almost a borrowed phonemic distinction, but made > possible by the mophophonemic alternation of [f] and [v]). As > for 'of' and 'off', this is a stress difference. 'Off' is simply > a lexicalized stressed form of 'of' (this is why 'off of' as in > "get off of the grass" is considered substandard). >> ("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to >> hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the >> Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken >> as a simple fact. > I dare say that most descriptions of modern English do take this > as a simple fact (just as many dictionaries will tell you that > pronominal determiners are pronouns) and therefore not worth > investigating. But facts are not data. Data exists in nature. > Facts are observations about data. Facts are a matter of > interpretation and facts can be wrong. [PR] It is, perhaps, inevitable that we cannot reach agreement about 'phoneme' when such common words as 'fact' are defined so individually. The first definition of 'fact' in AHD is "1. something known with certainty"; and the third: "3. something that has been objectively verified". It is impossible for me to regard a 'datum' (AHD: "1. an assumed, given, measured, or otherwise determined *fact* or proposition . . .") as other than a 'fact', and I would object to "assumed . . . proposition" as being a proper part of the definition. [RW] > Sometimes it is necessary > to go beyond surface appearances to see if the facts are correct > interpretations of the data. What I want to know is what are the > data on which this "simple fact" of the phonemic status of [th] > and [dh] in English is based. In this case, it would seem that > [th, dh] just ride along on the coattails of [s, z] and [f, v] in > the belief that if [s, z] and [f, v] split then [th, dh] must > have too. > The creation of the allophones of original /s/, /f/, and /th/ > happened for all at the same time: unvoiced spirants between > voiced sounds following a stressed vowel became voiced. This did > not increase the number of contrasts (phonemes), merely the number > of allophones (/s/ [s, z]; /f/ [f, v]; /th/ [th, dh]). The > phonemic splits came later and for different reasons. First came > morphophonemic alternation followed by, for /s/ and /z/, the use > of /z/ to create expressive and imitative words; for /f/ and /v/, > the need to differentiate borrowed words with inherent [f] and > [v]; and, for [th] and [dh] -- well, I just can't think of > anything that compels the use of [th] and [dh] for making > distinctions. If you can provide something, I'd be glad to > listen to it. But it will have to be better than loanwords that > don't contrast with anything else and morphophonemic alternations > or parallelism with [s, z] and [f, v]. > But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find > something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible > for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of > as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the > graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two > sounds? Now English does not have the world's greatest fit > between writing and sounds. The same sounds can be written with > different characters and the same characters can be used to write > different sounds. In some cases, there is no way to tell how > certain written combinations are to be spoken. There is no rule > to tell you how a word like 'cough' is to be pronounced. One > simply has to learn the pronunciation with the word. But with > [th] and [dh] this is not necessary, even though there is no clue > in the writing (with the exception of <-e> in verbs which marks > the fact that the preceding is voiced). Otherwise one would > have to learn the pronunciation of every word containing > separately. [PR] As you seem to be acknowledging, learned pronunciation has really no bearing on spelling, or each dialect would have a separate orthography. [RW] > When dealing with phonemes, if you know the pronunciation, you > can distinguish a word from all other words with similar > sounds except for the different phonemes. Phonemes distinguish > between words when there is no other criterion for distinguishing > them and are completely arbitrary. Thus there is no rule > (phonological, morphological, or syntactical) for distinguishing > between /fat/ and /bat/ except the rule that says that /f/ and > /b/ are different phonemes. The phonemes /f/ and /b/ don't tell > you anthing about these words except that they are different. If > /f/ were always used only in verbs and /b/ were always used only > in nouns, then one would have to take another look at the > phonemic status of /f/ and /b/. > When dealing with [th] and [dh] if you recogize the word > category, you will know what the sound is. You don't have to > learn the pronunciation with the word except in a very few cases > (like 'rhythm'). Otherwise, even for words that you may not be > familiar with like 'thole' or 'wether' or 'heterochthonous' you > will know whether [th] or [dh] is correct. Words such as > 'blithe' which can be pronounced with either [th] or [dh] (not as > a matter of stress, but simply free variation) do not speak > strongly in favor of phonemic status for these two sounds > (athough it doesn't necessarily speak against it either). > So once again, the only native words where [th] and [dh] contrast > is 'thigh' and 'thy'. 'Thy' belongs to a class of words that > always has [dh] in this position. 'Thigh' belongs to a class of > words (not really a significant class, merely the complement of > the other class) that always has [th] in this position. The > apparent opposition between [th] and [dh] in this example is just > a historical accident (in much the same way that homynyms come > into existence through historical accidents) since the original > distinction between these words did not depend on this > opposition. Thus this "minimal pair" is not adequate to establish > [th] and [dh] as separate phonemes in my opinion since > distribution of sounds by rule is a more important criterion even > if the rules are not phonological. > And again, if you have evidence for the phonemic status of [th] > and [dh] in English (and I don't mean evidence that they are > recognized as different sounds [phones] or that they are > morphophonemic variants), I will be happy to evaluate it. I just > haven't found any that I consider convincing despite the fact that > most grammars will list them as separate phonemes and put forth > such "minimal pairs" as 'thigh' - 'thy' or 'ether' - 'either' or > 'wreath' - 'wreathe' as evidence. > Now there is no reason why [th] and [dh] can't be separate > phonemes in English. They might very well be. Or they might > well be on their way to becoming separate phonemes. But if they > are, one can reasonably expect there to be some evidence of it. > If [th] and [dh] are different phonemes in English, then it is an > unused phonemic distinction. And since it is unused, it can't be > proved that they aren't phonemically distinct just because there > is no evidenc that they are. What can be shown is that [th, dh] > are allophones of /th/ that resulted from the original voicing of > spirants in a voiced environment and that these allophones can be > used as morphophonemic variants. But without unequivocal > evidence that they are used as separate phonemes, it is safer to > assume that they are not. > In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native > English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic > word (this, that, thou, then, there). If you find [th] in a > voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a > loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]). If you find > [dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a > noun-verb or a singular-plural pair. What is needed to show that > [th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they > mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment > that is completely independent of the environment or any rule. [PR] A very eloquent presentation of a point of view. However, apparently, it hinges on one key concept: the distinction in the minds of native English speakers between 'native' and 'foreign' words, a distinction that I believe is non-provable. Furthermore, Old Norse gives us both /raiz/ ('raise') and /rais/ ('race'). If anyone outside of an etymologist knew these origins, of what possibly use could it be? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 20:50:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 15:50:31 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 10:15 AM > At 09:54 PM 4/4/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >> [PRp] >> I would have to say that you are wrong. [SF] >> There is no phoneme in any language which has not been established as a >> component of a minimal pair. > Examples have been given that show otherwise. [PR] Sorry, I must have missed those. How about rehearsing those "examples" one more time? >> [PRp] >> I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [SF] > Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the > reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a > rule. [PR] Generalizations are dandy but specifics are more helpful. Examples? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 21:54:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:54:57 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Bob and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 11:12 AM > On Tue, 4 Apr, proto-language wrote: > >> [RWp] >> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >> condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >> [PRp] > [ moderator snip ] >> There is no phoneme in any language which has not been >> established as a component of a minimal pair. [RW] > So what? [PR] Admitting this puts us on a better track. [RW] > Do you assume therefore that anything that is a > component of a minimal pair is a phoneme? I know that you have > said that using logic is childish, but you really ought to try it > sometime. [PR] I have never in my entire life said or implied that "using logic is childish" or anything like it. On the contrary, I try on principle as well as I am able to consistently apply logic to all questions in my life. To assert that I have said such a thing is inaccurate, mildly defamatory, and a token of incipient memory problems. To answer your other question, if one adds the semantic qualification (eliminating pairs like 'half/halve'), yes, I do believe that any one segment of a minimal pair is, at least, synchronically, a phoneme --- and I reject the qualification of 'native/foreign' perception as naif in extremis (leaving pairs like 'ether/either'). Education entails a respect for the written word but, even a linguist such as yourself, might remember that a pre-school child who learns the words 'either' and 'ether' is not going to be aware automatically or instructed that 'ether' follows different phonological rules than 'either'. [RW] > Saying that anything that occurs in a minimal pair is a phoneme > because all phonemes occur in minimal pairs is like saying that > anything that is black is a raven because all ravens are black. > I know you won't understand what I'm talking about, but any > textbook on logic will tell you that for any universal statement > (all S are P) the simple converse (all P are S) is not valid. > The minimum valid conversion of "all S are P" is "some P are S". [PR] In looking at the logic textbook I studied under Professor Wilfred Payne some 40 years ago, which, of course, has a section on undistributed middles, another section which describes logical fallacies, including argumenta ad hominem, which I consider "I know you won't understand what I'm talking about") as a good example. Employing logical fallacies in a discussion seems to me to be the definition of displaying illogic, would you not agree? > [RWp] >>> The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English >>> minimal pair >>> 'thigh' / 'thy' >>> (the pair 'thistle' / 'this'll' [contraction of 'this will'] >>> is clearly marginal) >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). [PRp] >> That is exactly what I would claim. I would claim phonemic >> status for both. [RW] > Yes, of course you would. I wouldn't expect you to do anything > else. [RWp] >>> This is because otherwise the sounds are in complementary >>> distribution, [dh] occuring in voiced environments >> [PRp] >> What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? [RW] > An environment that is voiced. [PR] Sibylline answers such as this do not help elucidate problems. [PRp] >> What is environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? [RWp] > This is a morphophonemic alternation. You can make as long a > list as you want of such alternations and wherever there is a > distinction between [th] and [dh], [th] will occur in a > substantive and [dh] will appear in a verb that is derived from > it. Very rarely, [dh] will appear also in the substantive, but > it will always appear in the verb. > [RW] >>> and in deictic words and pronouns, [th] otherwise. >> [PR] >> I think it most illegitimate to suggest non-phonological >> conditioning factors. [RW] > And here you would have the full support of Stanley Friesen. But > rules are rules, whether they are phonological, morphological, or > lexical. It is just a question of how much one area of language > can affect another. [PR] How refreshing to be in agreement with someone on the list! > [RWp] >>> Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two >>> sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a >>> single phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds >>> can be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate >>> phonemes.' >> [PRp] >> I am claiming that the *e/*o-Ablaut can be described by a rule. [RW] > Which is your strongest argument. Which is why you should be > supporting my argument instead of claiming that distribution by > rule is less important than minimal pairs in determining > phonemicity. [PR] What I do not think you grasp is that I have arrived at a similar position to yours based on a semantic qualification although rejecting your 'native/foreign' perception qualification. [RW] > You don't seem to realize that, while what I have > said does not directly support your position, it does give you > a stronger position to argue from. I know that thinking things > through is not your forte, but you really should learn to think > in terms of how the various parts of a problem relate to each > other. [PR] This gratuitous insult speaks nothing for your argument. [RW] > You say that the distribution of *e and *o is governed > by rule and that only a minimal pair would prove their phonemic > status. And I say that even a minimal pair wouldn't necessarily > demonstrate their phonemicity so long as they can still be > predicted by rule and then you say no, all phonemes occur in > minimal pairs so anything that occurs in a minimal pair must be a > phoneme. And you claim that this is a rational line of thought? [PR] In my opinion, it is possibly your lack of rigorous logic which is causing the problem. And, you are recasting the argument in your terms. If we are dealing with a present/perfect alteration of vowel, my reason for rejecting such a pair as minimal would be from the stanpdoint of their only minimally differentiated semantics --- not "governed by rule". My view of the Ablaut is that it was, at least, originally phonologically motivated although some examples, like *wo'ida, might be attributable not to deletion of the reduplication but to simple analogy with forms like *de'dorka. We may never know a definitive answer to that question. [RW]] > But if you claim that [th] and [dh] must be phonemes because they > occur as morphophonemic variants as you did above (bath, bathe), > then you have lost your argument about *e and *o because they are > also morphophonemic variants. Indeed, it was in part their > morphophonemic alternation that led, through internal > reconstruction, to the laryngeal theory. [PR] I am not sure I understand your point here. [RW] > So if morphophonemic > alternation (conditioned variance) demonstrates phonemicity, then > *e and *o are separate phonemes. Which position do you want to > support? [PR] I believe I have made that fairly clear above. >> [RWp] >>> Minimal pairs are a shortcut to finding phonemes, but >>> contrastive environments are a clincher. >> [PRp] >> I find this totally unacceptable. [RW] > Yes, I can see why it would confuse you. [PR] Another gratuitous insult! If there is any confusion, it is about the decorum of a discussion. [RW] > The second part of the > statement is not entirely clear. So I will try to explain it in > more detail and write very slowly and distinctly. [PR] Write as comes naturally. [RW] > Minimal pairs is a heuristic. A heuristic is a way of finding > things that might prove significant. Minimal pairs is a useful > way of looking for phonemes. Now if a heuristic works regularly, > people tend to start thinking of it as a law. Minimal pairs is > so successful at predicting phonemes that often no further > investigation is done and a minimal pair is considered a > sufficient condition for phonemicity. This is the position taken > by you and Stanley Friesen (and probably a lot of other people). [PR] So, I am not the only illogical, confused person out there. What a relief! [RW] > But a lot of people also realize that minimal pairs is not a > necessary condition for establishing phonemicity (I realize that > you probably don't understand this stuff about "necessary" and > "sufficient" conditions because it has to do with logic, but bear > with me) and this is where you and Stanley part company. [PR] Strangely, I believe I can handle the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient". As I have indicated above, I believe minimal pairs are "necessary" but not "sufficient" lacking the semantic qualification. [RW] > Now I believe that minimal pairs is not even a sufficient > condition for establishing phonemicity, particularly when the > number of minimal pairs is minimal. I believe that distribution > of sounds by rule is more important than what may appear to be > minimal pairs in determining whether two sounds are distinct > phonemes or not. I also believe that the rule that determines > the distribution of the sounds does not have to be phonological. > This is where you and Stanley join up again, in the belief that > the conditioning environment must be phonetic. [PR] Absolutely correct. [RW] > What I meant by "contrastive environments" is, as I said, not > entirely clear from the statement (but I'm not entirely sure that > saying "non-contrasting" would have been better). [PR] A "rule" apparently so difficult to articulate must be rather tricky (or arbitrary) to apply. [RW] > What I had in > mind is that the different phonemes provide the only contrast, > and this contrast must be completely arbitrary for the two sounds > to be separate phonemes. That is to say that the phonemes > themselves can tell you nothing about the words involved except > that they are different. If a sound regularly occurs only in a > certain class of words and a similar but different sound > regularly occurs elsewhere, then this is complementary > distribution. And complementary distribution of similar sounds > points to no phonemic distinction between them. [PR] If this were really an example of logic applied, I confess to preferring illogicality. When you are allowed to introduce non-phonological characteristics (such as "pronominal') into phonological explanations, you have opened Pandora's box to any kind of cockamamie qualification to explain phonological facts (or data, or whatever you prefer). [RW] > If you can > always predict which sound will be present from the environment, > then the sounds are not different phonemes (in that environment). [PR] And how does your theory predict /dher/ ('there')? Is it 'pronominal' or is this the 'adverbial' class of exceptions? [RW] > Phonemes should tell you nothing about words except that they are > different (i.e., they shouldn't tell you that one word is a noun > and the other is a verb or that one word is a pronoun and the > other is not, or that one is singular and the other plural, etc.). [PRp] >> Show me contrastive phonological environments. [RW] > Sorry, "phonological" wasn't mentioned in my statement, so you > will have to provide your own. [PR] Does /dher/ tell you something that it is not telling me? >> [RWp] >>> As in the comparative method and internal reconstruction, >>> similar items that are in complementary distribution are usually >>> aspects of the same thing. But believe it or not, linguists will >>> still disagree on the phonemic status of sounds and different >>> analyses may result in different numbers of phonemes claimed for >>> a particular language. [PR] If they are using identical definitions, there should be no legitimate disagreement. >> [PR] >> Apparently, it is fated for you and me to never agree. [RW] > Well, so long as you disagree with everything I say, even if you > have to destroy your own arguments to do it, just because I have > said it, this is doubtless true. [PR] Methinks the lady protesteth too much. I have nothing against you or anyone on this list personally. [RW] > But I wouldn't call it fate, > I'd call it a conditioned reflex. I myself would have phrased it > differently, and would have said that I will agree with you when > you are right, but perhaps this is actually exactly the same > thing that you have said. [PR] So, I am a contrary Mary. My arguments are motivated solely by perversity. Do you really believe that? [PRp] >> I will state that in private correspondence, a second professional >> linguist has affirmed the non-phonemic status of IE *o. [RW] > I will let you answer this one yourself because: > On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > >Whether any given linguist did or did not accept the validity of > >my studies is not a proof or disproof of my work. > Now here is something that I can agree with you on. Who agrees > or disagrees with a theory is not proof pro or con. Who makes a > statement does not affect its validity. Who proposes or accepts > the theory is immaterial. It matters not whether the proponent > of a theory is well or poorly educated, is a "professional > linguist" (PL) or a known crackpot (not necessarily different > things), has been convicted of income tax evasion, or wets the > bed. All that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. [PR] Essentially, I would agree. But a consensus of "poorly educated people" would not be a desideratum whereas a consensus of professional linguists would be a sufficient but not necessary indication of eventual vindication. [RW] > A theory is not automatically wrong because it is proposed by > Patrick Ryan, and it is not automatically correct because it is > proposed by a PL. So whether a PL agrees with your ideas or not > is irrelevant, as you yourself pointed out on 27 May 1999. > Obviously PL's are not automatically correct in your mind or you > wouldn't be telling PL's that they are wrong on a daily basis. If > PL's are always right, then citing a PL is a good argument, but > if they are only right when they agree with you and wrong > otherwise, it rather vitiates your appeal to the authority of an > unnamed "professional linguist". This doesn't mean that you are > wrong though; it just means that it isn't a valid argument. And > all that matters is the evidence and the argumentation. [PR] When you're right, you're right. But, if you think I am casting myself as a Devil's Advocate against professional linguists, you are wrong. I agree with them far more than I disagree; and, in the basal question (*e/*o phonemicity), I do substantially agree with at least one profssional linguist of high regard: Professor Winfred Lehmann. To get back to the point you seem to be attempting to make, if every linguist agreed with me, we could all be wrong, but the burden on the corrector would be very heavy. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Apr 21 15:47:55 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 10:47:55 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> mclasutt at brigham.net 04/13/00 11:49PM >>> [Larry Trask] > This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. But it > is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the distribution of > two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single > phoneme. [Robert Whiting] > I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to > establish two sounds as separate phonemes. [Pat Ryan] > I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language > which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. I have to disagree with all three of you. If you have a minimal pair, there is no question that you have a phonemic contrast. However, you can have a phonemic contrast without having a minimal pair and with a rule for the distribution. Aside from the familiar English angma vs. h, which is a good if peculiar example, there is the matter of /n/ vs. /l/ in Yoruba. Ladefoged argued in 1964 that these were in complementary distribution, [l] before oral vowels and [n] before nasal vowels. (Yoruba has a phonemic contrast between oral and nasal vowels, and nasal consonants can occur in roots only before nasal vowels.) However, I argued in a 1971 paper that the contrast had to be phonemic because the only cases of alternation were in CV words of the shape niN, where -N is an ASCII diacritic marking the preceding vowel as nasal. In these cases, if the vowel elided before a vowel-initial noun, a very common occurrence, the /n/ became /l/. There are, however, verbs beginning with /n/ but with one of the other nasal vowels, /aN/ or /uN/. With these verbs, if the vowel elides, the initial /n/ remains /n/. The /n/~/l/ alternation, then, is morphophonemic and /n/ and /l/ are separate phonemes even though their distribution can be stated by rule and they are in complementary distribution. There is, incidentally, dialect evidence to indicate the Standard Yoruba /niN/ forms represent a diachronic merger of what survive as /li/ and /niN/ forms in those dialects. [Robert Whiting] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: > 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both > [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some > would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what > occurred with /s/ and /z/). English /th/ vs. /dh/ is a curious case. The contrast didn't become phonemic till the 18th c., and even then the conditions for it were strange and non-phonological. There were already some final cases of the contrast, as in those dialects that had lost final schwa, so that "breath/breathe", "wreath/wreathe" and the like were in contrast, but there was no initial contrast until the function words, largely deictics and largely unstressed, laxed the initial /th/ to /dh/. However, there was a sizable set of content words, like "theology" that had initial unstressed syllables beginning with /th/, and none of these voiced. An oddity is that the function word "thither", which is rare in contemporary ModE, has initial /th/ for all AmE speakers I've consulted. American dictionaries regularly show /dh-/ as a second pronunciation, and British dictionaries I've checked either give only /dh-/ or give /th-/ as a second choice. Apparently Americans who know the word generally don't treat it as a function word. Given that the /s~z/ and /f~v/ contrasts had phonemicized early in ME and that SE English initial voicing had little influence, the late phonemicization of initial /th~dh/ looks rather like a nice example of pattern congruity. Herb Stahlke From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 22 14:58:43 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 17:58:43 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Apr, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[Larry Trask] >This is *a* method [finding minimal pairs] of establishing phonemes. >But it is not *the only* method of establishing phonemes. If the >distribution of two sounds cannot be stated by rule, then they can't >be assigned to a single phoneme. >[Robert Whiting] >I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to >establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >[Pat Ryan] I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no >phoneme in any language which has not been established as a component >of a minimal pair. >[Me] >This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs >out with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I must agree that what Pat says is not true, but I also must say that I am not ready to throw minimal pairs out either. Minimal pairs are a useful heurisitic, but that is all they are. While enough minimal pairs may be convincing in themselves if they occur in a variety of different environments, a minimal pair in itself may be evidence for, but not necessarily proof of, a phonemic distinction. I hope you can see the difference. Because of the definition of phoneme, you really have to consider the entire system before you can declare phonemicity. >I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal >pair. I think that you truly have to consider both 'teeth' and 'teethe' as morphophonemic variants of 'tooth'. >Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of >teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a >voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction >between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening >of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the >voicing). Historically, this is nonsense. the lengthing of [i:] in 'teethe' is a matter of stress. It is a matter of vowel quantity, not vowel quality. Both 'teeth' and 'teethe' have [i:] and if the ending is not stressed, both have the same vowel quality. The [i:] in both 'teeth' and 'teethe' is the result of umlaut caused by the addition of the plural ending (beginning with '-i') and the verbal suffix (beginning with '-j'; exactly the same change that took place in 'doom' - 'deem'), respectively. The fact that many speakers introduce this additional distinction by stressing the ending of the verb suggests that they do not consider the [th] - [dh] distinction to be sufficient (i.e., they do not consider it phonemic). If 'tooth' had not preserved its umlaut plural (i.e., if 'tooth' [+ plural] --> *'tooths'), the question wouldn't arise. The 'e' on the end of 'teethe' is secondary, to indicate that it is voiced. The form was probably 'te:thian' when the voicing took place. The loss of final shwa in English (cf. Eng. 'help', Ger. 'hilfe') freed for such secondary functions. But synchronically, there is a difference between [th] - [dh] pairs. [dh] always indicates the verb. Very rarely, there is no distinction between verb and substantive ('tithe' [n.] / 'tithe' [v.]; 'smooth' / 'smoothe'), but this can hardly be a basis for claiming that [th] and [dh] are different phonemes. Allophonic splits occur when a conditioning environment causes a sound to change in that environment but not outside it. There are those who claim that when the conditioning environment is subsequently lost, then the allophones become phonemes because they are no longer predictable from the *phonological* environment. But I would maintain that if the distinction between the sounds is still predictable on the basis of the grammar, then the sounds are not fully phonemic because they can still be predicted from the morphological/grammatical environment. Phonemes should not let you predict meaning. If they do, then phonemes become a unit of meaning (as some, like Pat, have tried to claim), and this violates the rule of duality of patterning (sounds express meaning, but the sounds themselves have no inherent meaning). Phonemes should tell you nothing about the meaning of a word, whether it is grammatical meaning or lexical meaning (there is a large grey area here, that is not yet well researched, called sound symbolism). If they do, then you have Pat's Proto-Language(C). >But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) >English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, >sooth/soothe, etc. 'ether' [borrowed word] - 'either' [native word] 'thigh' [non-pronoun] - 'thy' [pronoun] 'wreath' [noun] - 'wreathe' [verb] 'sooth' [noun] - 'soothe' [verb] Now these distinctions wouldn't mean much in themselves, but when you consider that these distinctions based on the presence of [th] or [dh] are *always* valid, then you get the impression that as minimal pairs they aren't worth much. If you sometimes found intervocalic [th] in the [native word] column or initial [dh] in the [non-pronoun] column or final [th] in the verb column, then one would be justified in claiming a phonemic distinction between [th] and [dh]. Otherwise we can say that all words that have [th] in a voiced environment will be loans, any word that has [dh] in initial position will be a pronoun or a deictic word and any word that has [dh] in final position will be the verb part of a noun-verb pair. Beyond that, it is interesting to note that each of these "minimal pairs" is a special case of one sort or another. For 'ether' - 'either' there is a dialectal variant of 'either' that clearly distinguishes it from 'ether'. Both 'thigh' and 'thy' have long and distinguished phonological careers and the fact that they have ended up with only [th] and [dh] to differentiate them phonetically is simply a historical accident. Were one of them not a pronoun, they would have simply ended up as homynyms (like 'knight' and 'night' or 'right', 'rite', 'write', and 'wright'). 'Wreath' and 'wreathe' are also a special case becuase the actual verb derived from 'wreath' is 'writhe'. 'Wreathe' is a back formation from 'wreath' influenced by a ME variant 'wrethen' of 'writhe'. 'Sooth' and 'soothe' is one that I don't have an explanation for. By all rights (and in parallel with 'tooth' - 'teethe') the verb should have been *'seethe' (<-- OE 'so:dhian' [v.] <-- 'so:th') but it isn't. Of course, there is already a verb 'seethe', but it didn't have this form in OE ('se:odhan'). Something happened to block the umlaut in 'soothe'. I'd be interested to learn what it might have been. >However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >'uncle' /ata/, etc. Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning environment that prevented it has been lost historically. I'll tell you what: Let's assume that English has a phoneme (let's call it [=] just for consistency) that prevents an intervocalic dental spirant from being voiced. Now let's insert this phoneme in a word like 'ether' which shows an unvoiced intervocalic dental spirant /i:=ther/. Good -- now we no longer have a minimal pair 'ether' - 'either'. Now let's assume that English inserts this phoneme in all loanwords that have an unvoiced dental spirant in a voiced environment. Voila -- a phonetic environment that explains why loanwords have unvoiced intervocalic [th]. Now all we need is a rule that says /=th/ --> [dh] /__ m# and all intervocalic [th] in English is accounted for by phonological rules. Hey, this is fun. >On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, >With all the possibilities of root structure in Panamint, there just >aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic inventory has had to be >determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using permissible >initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. I agree with this completely. Minimal pairs are a heuristic that is useful for finding possible phonemes. When you don't have them, you have to use something else. >[Robert Whiting] >The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English minimal >pair: 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic >status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal >pair (although some would doubtless claim that there has been a >phonemic split similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). >[Me] >I disagree with Robert on this one. No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that either requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate phonemes. I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and how the evidence proves it one way or the other. >The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is >no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes >(depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the >same footing as other phonemes in the language). I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or /oj/ occur only in certain classes of words or only as morphophonemic alternants? Show me that in all the words where /zh/ occurs that /zh/ limits or restricts the meanings that it can have and I will grant you the point. It is said that /ng/ only occurs in word final position, but even this is not true (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be difficult to establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: places where these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be predicted by rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the point. >All phonemes do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence >equally impressive. Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and >unpredictability factors all point toward them being separate >phonemes. While the evidence for separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as >overwhelming as the evidence separating /s/ and /z/, it is still >enough to compel a separation on synchronic grounds. While I agree with the first statement, the second does not follow from it. Patterns of the occurrences of [th] and [dh] overwhelmingly show complementary distribution of the sounds and either lack of contrasts or predictable morphophonemic alternation. Morphophonemic alternations may be the beginnings of phonmeic split, but until the sounds are used as oppositions outside of the morphonemic environment, I don't think it is legitimate to construe them as separate phonemes, even if the original conditioning environment has been lost. Synchronic grounds don't really have anything to do with it. Synchronic rules are still rules and most will agree that synchronic rules recapitulate diachronic rules. They don't always have the same basis, but by and large they have the same results. The diachronic rules voiced [th] in verbs because it was in a voiced environment. Through the erosion of the infinitive ending, the voiced [dh] ended up word final while the substantive retained word final [th]. The synchronic rule simply says that you make a verb out of a substantive with final [th] by voicing the [th]. The synchronic rule doesn't reduplicate the diachronic events, but it does have the same result. And the synchronic rule is what someone who is learning the language has to learn. And through it he knows that any native English word that ends with [dh] will be a verb and that it should have a corresponding substantive ending in [th] (with a couple of exceptions as noted above). Now if there were other English words ending in [dh] that weren't verbs (as in 'cliff' vs. 'five' as opposed to 'life' vs. 'live'), one would have a case for the phonemicity of [dh] as one has a case for the phonemicity of [v]. But as long as final [dh] occurs only in verbs and the only way that it contrasts with [th] is through a substantive with the same root, I don't see a case for phonemicity. It is just distribution by rule. >[Pat Ryan] >What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is >environmentally voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? >[Me] Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This >is not appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the >phonological or morphophonological rules are still productive. Thanks for trying to explain to Pat, John, but although historically the voicing of [th] in verbs was phonologically conditioned and resulted in an allophonic split, loss of the conditioning environment does not make the synchronic rule any less valid. The synchronic rule is still there. One even notes that the rule for verbs has been maintained against the devoicing of intervocalic [dh] in the ordinal numbers once they had lost their voiced environment. The example of 'tithe', which was once simply the same as the ordinal 'tenth' (OE 'te:odha' [n.] - 'te:odhian' [v.] shows this clearly. If the voicing rule for verbs were no longer valid, the verbs would end in [th] just as the ordinal numbers do. The rule may not be productive any longer in the sense that new verb-noun pairs are not formed by this rule, but that doesn't mean that the synchronic rule doesn't exist. Now one could always invent a dummy, non-phonetic phoneme as was done in Comanche that can be inserted to show where the conditioning environment was lost (and graphemically, this is the purpose of the final 'e' on the verbs in English) but this is obviously just a device to provide a "phonological" explanation for why some intervocalic stops didn't undergo lenition and thus maintain the allophonic status of [p, v] without having to resort to a diachronic explanation. I don't see that there is really any difference in the outcome. >[Robert Whiting] >Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds >cannot be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single >phoneme," but also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be >stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' >[Me] >The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you saying that allophones automatically become separate phonemes when the phonological conditioning environment that maintains their allophonic identity is lost? And that they are phonemes even if they never contrast in an environment that can't be predicted, so long as the basis for predicting the environment is not phonological? Now if this is what you believe, I am not saying that it is wrong. It is more a matter of how one sees the interaction of the various parts of language. If the determination of phonemes is an entirely phonological process, then it is quite correct. But if other areas or language can affect phonology, then it is not necessarily so. Again, it is a question of how much one area of language can affect the others. A matter of where you draw your lines and how you make your definitions. There are a number of issues about phonology, morphology, and lexicon that are too lengthy to go into here, but in a summary fashion let me say that the basic function of language requires certain relationships between phonology and morphology. Languages express meaning (morphemes) through sounds (phonemes). But the sounds, taken in isolation have no inherent meaning of their own associated with them. For this reason, phonemes can indicate differences in meaning, but are not units of meaning. Sounds that can only indicate a functional difference (a difference in grammatical meaning) when contrasted with a similar sound should not be considered a fully functional phonemes in the environment in which it can only mark this difference. Such a sound can be called a morphophoneme to indicate that it is restricted to contrasts between morphological variants of the same word. But if your definition requires that any sound that contrasts with another to produce a different meaning is a phoneme, then morphophonemes must be considered phonemes. >There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun into a verb by >voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, e.g., >'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. The fact that it is no longer productive does not make it any less of a rule. It is not an archaic rule. It is a rule that exists in modern English. It just isn't a productive rule. If it were no longer a rule the verb from 'breath' would be 'breath'. It is no longer a productive rule because the infinitive is no longer formed in the same way. There was no archaic rule that said make a verb out of a noun by voicing a final spirant. The spirant was voiced because it occured in a voiced environment in the infinitive. When the distinctive form of the infinitive was lost (i.e., the conditioning environment was lost), the voiced/voiceless distinction in final position was maintained to distinguish verb from noun and that is where the synchronic rule came from. But this is still a morphophonemic distinction because this is the only place that it occurs and it is regular and predictable. >Even the intervocalic voicing of /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., >path [th] and paths [dh], but path's [th]. The (morphophonemic) voicing of spirants that occurs before the plural marker [s, z] is regularly neutralized before the possessive singular (it is a different rule): sing. pl. poss. sing. thief thieves thief's life lives life's sheaf sheaves sheaf's path [th] paths [dhz] path's [ths] wreath [th] wreaths [dhz] wreath's [ths] The voiced - voiceless opposition of singular and plural is also regularly neutralized in loan words chief chiefs (not *chieves) faith [th] faiths [ths] math [th] maths [ths] and occasionally in native words death deaths [ths] and sometimes both occur hoof hoofs ~ hooves But there is no unpredictable contrast. >These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and >thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for >these pairs. I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' so it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and [pavi] aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words are both native in Comanche). 'Thigh' - 'thy' is just a historical accident. You say that synchronicity demands that [th] and [dh] be separate phonemes and that non-productive forms cannot be used for synchronic phonemicization and then you give me evidence based on loanwords and obsolete forms. Not good enough. >Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it in >a theoretical sense. But it's very good for describing the evidence. Perhaps the theory needs some reworking so that it accounts for the evidence better? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 22 19:51:43 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 14:51:43 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2000 11:49 PM [PR] First let me thank you for your thoughtful and interesting response. > [Pat Ryan] > I would have to say that you are wrong. There is no phoneme in any language > which has not been established as a component of a minimal pair. > [JM] > This is not true, Pat, although I'm not ready to throw minimal pairs out > with the bath water as Robert seems to be. I think that you truly have to > consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal pair. [PR] Is not the question being obscured by considering synchrony and diachrony simultaneously? I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that 'teeth' and 'teethe' had, in the *past*, an identical voiceless fricative in root-final position, and that only subsequent to the feature +Voice being transferred to it with the suppression of the following final vowel, did it *become* voiced; but, at *present*, the difference between the voiced and unvoiced fricatives signals a semantic difference if minimal, i.e. the difference between a noun and a verb. If I apply the same rationale to the question of *e/*o-Ablaut, I would be forced to concede that both *e and *o were phonemic in earliest IE (since, broadly, the alternation signals an analogous minimal semantic [grammatical] difference), which I am not prepared to do at this time. So, I would admit that 'teeth/teethe' does *not* establish two phonemes (/th/, */dh/), and would have to say that /th/ has a historically conditioned allophone of /dh/; 'historically', because obviously the sequence CVC(e) does not currently condition voicing in the consonant before the muted (e): e.g. 'safe'. On the other hand, you have furnished below some examples that do, in my opinion, establish /dh/ as an English phoneme: e.g. 'ether/either' on a synchronic basis. The only example with which I would have a real problem is 'sooth/soothe' since 'sooth' in the sense of 'soft' is obsolescent. [JM] > Historically, yes, these two > forms were not (the 'e' on the end of teethe was a phonetic element which > put the voiceless /th/ in a voicing environment, but synchronically, there > is no distinction between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the > lengthening of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not > cause the voicing). But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least > American) English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, > sooth/soothe, etc. > However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic and > the historical changes that have further obscured them in Comanche, this > language is full of pairs that look very much like minimal pairs on the > surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' and [pavi] 'older brother' > look very much like a minimal pair. However, they represent /pa=pi/ and > /papi/ respectively. (The = is a phoneme in Comanche that prevents the > lenition of a following stop. It is fully justified on morphophonemic > grounds without relying on the historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and > Shoshoni which is cognate.) There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' > /a=ta/ versus [ara] 'uncle' /ata/, etc. [PR] In my opinion, in defining a phoneme, we are only justified on operating with synchronic data. [JM] > On the issue of requiring minimal pairs, 2Panamint is a good counterexample. > In languages where typical roots are monosyllabic (like English), one may > find many minimal pairs, but even in English, where there are 7392 possible > one syllable words of the structure (C)V(C), there are only 1729 of these > that actually occur in my dialect of English. For example, the largest > "minimal set" consists of the frame [_ir]. I have 'peer, tier, beer, deer, > gear, cheer, jeer, fear, sear, sheer, hear, veer, mere, near, leer, rear, > we're, year'. Notice that [kir], [thir], [dhir], [zir], [zhir], [ngir], and > [hwir] do not exist. [PR] We seem to be proceeding from very different outlooks. To me, that there is no */hwir/ is not material to the question. It suffices that pairs like /hwer/ ('where') and /wer/ ('wear') exist. But, I believe we must have at least *one* minimal pair for a phoneme to be established. [JM] > There are also no words in my dialect that start with a [g] and end in a > voiceless alveopalatal affricate. In Panamint, the typical root structure is > CV(X)CV (X is a gemination marker, an /h/, or a nasal). The bisyllabic > structure of the typical root means that minimal pairs are far less likely > than they are in English. For example, there is a minimal pair tykka (y is > barred i) 'eat'/nykka 'dance'/-pykka 'suffer' (this one, however, never > occurs without a noun incorporated). That's the largest one I've ever been > able to find (and -pykka is an iffy inclusion since it never occurs in > isolation). There's no kykka, kwykka, ?ykka, sykka, hykka, tsykka, mykka, > ngykka, ngwykka, jykka, or wykka. With all the possibilities of root > structure in Panamint, there just aren't many minimal pairs. The phonemic > inventory has had to be determined in other, more subtle ways, such as using > permissible initial segments, morphophonemic alternations, etc. [PR] As you know from what I have written above, I cannot accept this. > [Robert Whiting] > The distribution by rule takes precedence. Take the English > minimal pair: > 'thigh' / 'thy'. Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both > [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although some > would doubtless claim that there has been a phonemic split similar to what > occurred with /s/ and /z/). > [JM] > I disagree with Robert on this one. The evidence for establishing /th/ and > /dh/ as separate phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, > and /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs > to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the language). All phonemes > do not have to be equally common, nor the evidence equally impressive. > Patterns of morphophonemic, environmental, and unpredictability factors all > point toward them being separate phonemes. While the evidence for > separating /th/ and /dh/ is not as overwhelming as the evidence separating > /s/ and /z/, it is still enough to compel a separation on synchronic > grounds. [PR] Essentially, I would agree. > [PRp] > What in Heaven's name is a "voiced environment"? What is environmentally > voiced in 'bathe' as opposed to 'bath'? > [JM] > Robert's referring to a historically "voiced environment". This is not > appropriate evidence for synchronic phonemicization unless the phonological > or morphophonological rules are still productive. [PR] With this I would fully agree. > [Robert Whiting] > Thus it is not only as Larry says "If the distribution of two sounds cannot > be stated by rule, then they can't be assigned to a single phoneme," but > also 'If the distribution of similar sounds can be stated by rule, then they > can't be assigned to separate phonemes.' > [JM] > The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the assignment of > a PHONOLOGICAL rule. There is an archaic MORPHOPHONEMIC rule (make a noun > into a verb by voicing a final /th/), but this is no longer productive, > e.g., 'path'/*'pathe', 'math'/*'mathe'. Even the intervocalic voicing of > /th/ isn't always productive, e.g., path [th] and paths [dh], but path's > [th]. These two phonemes are NOT predictable, cp. ether/either and > thigh/thy. No phonological or morphophonological rule can account for these > pairs. Using semantic criteria ('if it's a pronoun, then') doesn't cut it > in a theoretical sense. [PR] Again, I agree. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 27 00:49:01 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 19:49:01 -0500 Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" To: Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2000 9:59 AM Subject: PIE e/o Ablaut > Dear Pat and anyone, > > I am truly grateful for the very explicitly critical reply to my mail, for > it gives me occasion to comment on some points that appear to have become > common heritage in the field of IE, even though the basis for them appears > slender or non-existing. I have a problem, however, with dragging named > authorities into this; do we have a right to bother third party just > because _we_ cannot come to an agreement? Still, the literature is there, > and for this very purpose. So, if our moderator permits, I'll react to > your posting in full. > On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, proto-language wrote: [PRp] >> To clarify what my understanding, wrong though it may be, of the purported >> change from *e to *o is, I will quote Lehmann's description of the alleged >> phenomenon, from page 110 of _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_, which I >> support with some reservations: >> "After various studies the conditions of change have been defined: /e'/ >> /e':/ [e' e': a' a':], with phonemic pitch accent, became [o' o':] when the >> chief accent was shifted to another syllable, and the syllable accented >> formerly received a secondary pitch accent." [JER] > That is not what we find. It may be a popular guess about the unknowable, > but, as far as observations _can_ be made, they are very potently against > it. This is not ad hoc, it's rather contra hoc. I could understand that a > de-accented /e/ turned into /o/ if all unaccented /e/'s became /o/ (as I > think they did at one point), but the next step for all would be to go on > to zero (as I believe they in fact did). Surely, this cannot explain IE > "o-grade", except for the plain cases where lengthening has occurred, so > that we get, e.g., *-e':n vs. *'-o:n from accented *-e'n-s and unaccented > *'-en-s respectively. The rule is completely inadequate to account for an > alternation between accented o and zero (as in the perfect), nor does it > tell us why the pretonic -o- of the causative has not been lost. [PRp] >> Now I feel, in view of the fact that this idea was originated and defended >> by an Indo-Europeanist of undoubted competence, that a dismissive question >> like "When will you ever learn?" is wholly unjustified. I, like some others, >> may well have incorrect ideas about some (or many) things but, as I >> understand it, one of the purposes of this list is to get constructive >> feedback on ideas so corrections, where appropriate, may be made. [JER] > Agreed, and now it's happening, in both directions. Too bad that > suprasegmentals are not being conveyed on the list, but my "When will you > ever learn?" was meant with a ring of sarcasm, potentially against myself > - meaning "How long can I go on disagreeing with everybody?" As opinions > stand, it seems to be the facts that ought to give in: I am still waiting > for solid evidence favoring the most popular views about ablaut; when will > the IE languages ever learn how they are supposed to be? I, by no means, intend to not respond to the rest of Jens' interesting posting, but two matters first: 1) I would like to thank Jens for clarification of his remark, which I am sorry I misunderstood. 2) Before we get into details, I would like a clarification from Jens regarding his remarks above. It seems to me that he is lumping stress-accent and tone-accent together. If I understand Lehmann's argument properly, the essence of it is that they must be treated separately. Clarification? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Apr 24 20:52:11 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 22:52:11 +0200 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 1 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <008601bfaca7$1f2caa40$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] >[PR] >Essentially, I agree with you. >Rightly or wrongly, however, I favor basically Trask's definition with >qualifications: "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning"; >the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define >in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would >say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but >that 'ether/either' does. Maybe one of the broadest definitions of "meaning" states that elements said to have different "meanings" are used in different "contexts". Referential, situational, syntactic, you name it. Different inflections are used in different contexts, so they constitute minimal pairs and they are routinely used to pin down the phonemes of languages. I won't use sooth and soothe in the same contexts (or "frames" if you like), so this example is sufficient to establish the phonemic status of /dh/. If you don't like "meaning" here, insert "function". -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 25 01:04:07 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 20:04:07 -0500 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 2 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, April 21, 2000 4:38 AM [PRp] >> There is more than one claim that has been made. One of which is that no >> language has /o:/ and /e:/ without a corresponding /o/ and /e/ unless /o:/ >> is derived from /au/ and /e:/ is derived from /ai/. >> This does not necessarily have to be synchronous. In Baluchi, it is obvious >> that /o:/ and /e:/ ultimately originated in an early Sanskrit /au/ and /ai/, >> is it not? [SG] > In diachronic terms, you are right, with the tiny (and picky) > amendment that the Balochi vowels are not derived from an "early > Sanskrit" source, since Balochi happens to be an Iranian language > rather than an Indic one. [PR] Oops! Should have said Indo-Iranian. But, equallly by friendly pickiness: why do you insist in Balochi when Baluchi is the normal English label? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From sarima at friesen.net Tue Apr 25 23:54:20 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:54:20 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <008601bfaca7$1f2caa40$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] At 05:07 PM 4/22/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >the qualification being that I take 'meaning', which Trask does not define >in the same place, as a difference in concept not in inflection. I would >say that 'sooth/soothe' does not establish /dh/ as an English phoneme but >that 'ether/either' does. I do not perceive the difference between sooth and soothe as *inflectional*, I perceive it as *derivational*. That is it is closer in effect to 'similar/similarity' than to 'hit/hits'. So, even if I accept you caveat, I would still treat 'sooth/soothe' as a minimal pair. (In fact I barely even perceive these two words as related)! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Apr 26 11:51:55 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: header ] Hereinafter "#" is the schwa. (I am not using `@' here, as some emailers including mine have a fit of the sillies thinking that any word with `@' in is an email address.) Someone wrote:- >> However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >> and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >> Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >> minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >> and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >> However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >> phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >> It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >> historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >> There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >> 'uncle' /ata/, etc. Robert Whiting answered:- > Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this > phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic > realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal > pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, > but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to > explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning > environment that prevented it has been lost historically. ... An example of such a "silent phoneme" that some would invent, in a more familiar language, is the French "h aspire'" that prevents liaison in some French words, e.g. "le haricot" {l#ariko}, "les haricots2 {leariko}, where by the above analogy some would write {ariko} as {=ariko}. That this French so-called `=' phoneme is derived from a pronounced {h} sound, is merely old history (except in Normandy, where this {h} sound persists, or so I read once.) Likewise in standard moderm French, final closed {e} as in "je donnai", and final open {e} as in "je donnais", are now separate phonemes, whereas they were once likely allophones according to whether or not they were followed by a now-vanished final consonant. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 25 13:54:03 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:54:03 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000421070626.00afb730@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > At 09:38 AM 4/14/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >> On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: > >>> ... pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >>> Arthur, etc etc. >> And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of >> loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on >> native English phonology. > All of the listed words are old loans, and are fully Anglicized. > They are no longer perceived as "foreign" by the majority of speakers. > Thus they are indeed quite relevant to the *current* phonemic status > of the sounds they include. As I said, "foreign word" is a perceptual category and will vary from speaker to speaker. Indeed, most speakers won't even know what a loan word is. So we can write off the fact than intervocalic unvoiced [th] only appears in foreign words as coincidence. Can we then write off the regularity of sound change as coincidence too? I really do think that when there is an overwhelmingly regular pattern then it has to be acknowledged. But I agree that synchronic grammar has to be independent of historical developments. Speakers of a language learn its grammar. They very seldom learn the history of its grammar. >> Loan words do not necessarily follow >> the phonological rules of the borrowing language. > Only before they are nativized. Once nativized, they become relevant. Sure, but again, this is a perceptual category. But most speaker will realize that native words do not have unvoiced intevocalic [th]. >> In fact this >> is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it >> doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell >> that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > 'Padre' is still perceived as a Spanish word in English. Few even know > that 'authority' is NOT originally a native word. Sure, by people who know what Spanish (although it might also be from Italian or Portuguese) and know what a loan word is. Most in the military think that it is just what you call the chaplain. So let's consider 'patriot' instead. Few even know that 'patriot' is NOT originally a native word. It's been in the language longer than 'padre'. Or let's consider 'patron' or even 'pattern'. Perceptions of these as foreign or native words may vary considerably. Few may even see any connection between 'father' and 'padre', 'patriot', 'patron', and 'pattern'. But this doesn't change the fact that you can see which word is native and which are loans. >>> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc >> These are morphophonemic variants. One method of forming verbs >> from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant. > And in all of your examples the two sounds are phonemically distinct. > That is /s/-/z/, and /f/-/v/ are good phoneme pairs, so this is not an > argument for denying /dh/ phonemic status. No they are morphophonemic alternations which are predictable by rule. If you have 'half' and 'halve' the rule tells you that 'half' is a substantive and 'halve' is a verb derived from it. If you have 'fife' and 'five', this is a phonemic distinction because the alternation of [f] and [v] tells you nothing about the meanings of the words except that they are different. > Also, I am not sure I would allow word derivation processes to use > NON-phonemic changes. The very fact that a sound difference can be > used in word derivation is, to my mind, evidence that the difference > is in fact phonemic. Again, this is a difference between synchronic rules and diachronic (historical) rules (changes). The synchronic derivational rule is not based on the historical change, but they both have the same result. Historically, the spirant in the infinitive was voiced because it was in a voiced environment when the change that voiced spirants in this environment took place. The derivational rule came about because the spirant was not devoiced when the attrition of the infinitive ending left it in word final position (in contrast to the final [th] of the ordinal numbers when it became word final). >> But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find >> something, consider this also simple fact: If it is not possible >> for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of >> as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the >> graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two >> sounds? > In the same way that Hebrew can get by with a writing system that does > not represent most vowels, and the same way Mycenian Greek could get > by with a syllabic writing system that failed to represent the > pronunciation of the language. Hebrew gets by without writing most vowels because the vowels are predictable from the environment. There's that word again -- predictable. Mycenaenean Greek got by because the writing system was used for extremely limited purposes and in administrative texts and inventories they drew little pictures to tell the reader what the word was so he didn't have to rely on the lousy phonological fit between the writing system and the language. > Answer: a native speaker has the vocabulary *memorized*, so they > *know* which words are pronounced which way, and read that *into* the > written word. No, the answer is that people learn to speak *before* they learn to read and write (in fact, some never learn to read and write at all, but this doesn't affect their ability as speakers). If there is a good fit between the writing system and the phonology of the langauge then the reader doesn't have to know anything about the vocabulary. When I was in Italy many years ago, I encountered someone who promised me that he would teach me to read, write, and speak Italian in 6 hours (1 hour a week for 6 weeks). He was as good as his word. At the end of that time, if I saw something written in Italian I could speak it flawlessly; if I heard something spoken I could write it easily. The only problem was that I couldn't understand a word of it. He taught me the relationship between the writing system and the sounds of the language. Someone (Italian) later handed me an invitation written in Italian and I read it to them, and then said, "but what does it mean?" The reply was, "but you read it perfectly, you can't possibly not know what it means." The same is not true of spoken and written English. Finnish children learn to write from dictation at the age of 7 or 8. English speaking children never do. Spelling in English is more of an art than a science. That is why the spelling bee is such a popular entertainment in English speaking countries. In Finnish or Italian what would be the point? Once you hear a word spoken properly you know how to spell it. Once you see a word written you know how to pronounce it. But the point is that speakers don't have the entire vocabulary *memorized*. They couldn't. How many words are there in an English dictionary? When they hear a word that they don't recognize they have to guess how to spell it. When they see a written word they don't recognize they have to guess how to pronounce it based on certain rules. If one knows a couple of rules one can always guess how to pronounce in English. That's why the distribution of sounds represented by is predictable and not arbitrary distinctions. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Wed Apr 26 00:02:48 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 17:02:48 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <007001bfac9c$7ac575e0$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 03:50 PM 4/22/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >[SF] >> Unfortunately, every such rule I have seen proposed requires modifying the >> reconstructed PIE lexicon, or it has too many exceptions to be counted as a >> rule. >[PR] >Generalizations are dandy but specifics are more helpful. >Examples? Try some of the other letters in this thread: for instance *to'mos/tomo's, which makes hash of just about every rule so far suggested. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Apr 28 00:30:17 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 12:30:17 +1200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >>> Robert Whiting 04/14 6:38 PM >>> On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark wrote: At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] >>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although >>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split >>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/). This is because >>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh] >>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and >>> pronouns, [th] otherwise. [and I wrote] >> I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several >> days without anyone questioning the original statement about >> complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English, >> which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the >> pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair, >> examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to >> find: pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, >> Arthur, etc etc. [to which Robert Whiting replied] > And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of > loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on > native English phonology. Loan words do not necessarily follow > the phonological rules of the borrowing language. In fact this > is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it > doesn't obey the phonological rules. This is how you can tell > that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan. > I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I > was speaking about native English words, not borrowings. Perhaps > I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone > knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a > language you should deal with words that are native to that > language. I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your > list. You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that > have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a > loan. There are a very few examples where the complementary > distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't > mentioned any of them. [to which I reply] I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English, and (ii) the reality that we are trying to get at is what is in speakers' heads. The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? Ross Clark From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Apr 25 09:05:44 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 03:05:44 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] [I, John McLaughlin, wrote] >> I think that you truly have to consider teeth/teethe to be a minimal >> pair. [Robert Whiting wrote] > I think that you truly have to consider both 'teeth' and 'teethe' as > morphophonemic variants of 'tooth'. This is not a productive rule of Modern English. You really must distinguish between diachrony and synchrony. I can no longer make a noun into a verb by adding Germanic *-jan to it and then change the vowel by umlaut. It hasn't been a productive rule for about a thousand years. Therefore they are NOT synchronic morphophonemic variants. [I wrote] >> Historically, yes, these two forms were not (the 'e' on the end of >> teethe was a phonetic element which put the voiceless /th/ in a >> voicing environment, but synchronically, there is no distinction >> between the two except for the final voicing of th/dh (the lengthening >> of [i] in 'teethe' is due to the voicing of dh, it does not cause the >> voicing). [Robert wrote] > Historically, this is nonsense. the lengthing of [i:] in 'teethe' > is a matter of stress. It is a matter of vowel quantity, not vowel > quality. Both 'teeth' and 'teethe' have [i:] and if the ending is > not stressed, both have the same vowel quality. The [i:] in both > 'teeth' and 'teethe' is the result of umlaut caused by the addition of > the plural ending (beginning with '-i') and the verbal suffix > (beginning with '-j'; exactly the same change that took place in > 'doom' - 'deem'), respectively. The fact that many speakers introduce > this additional distinction by stressing the ending of the verb > suggests that they do not consider the [th] - [dh] distinction to be > sufficient (i.e., they do not consider it phonemic). If 'tooth' had > not preserved its umlaut plural (i.e., if 'tooth' [+ plural] --> > *'tooths'), the question wouldn't arise. Sorry, Robert, but you're mixing up all kinds of diachronic/synchronic and phonetic/phonemic levels here. Ask any phonetician of English and he or she will gladly tell you that vowels in Modern English preceding a voiced consonant are measurably longer in duration that vowels preceding a voiceless consonant. I'm not at all talking about the "long/short" vowel distinctions of Old English, nor the diachronic processes that you believe are still operating in Modern English morphology and morphophonemics. Phonemically, both teeth and teethe have /i:/ (or /i/ if you prefer distinguishing between /i/ and /I/ rather than using length as the distinguishing feature), but phonetically, the /i:/ of 'teeth' is not as long as the /i:/ in 'teethe'. There's no debate about this among phoneticians. [I wrote] >> But there are several good minimal pairs in (at least American) >> English for th/dh--ether/either, thigh/thy, wreath/wreathe, >> sooth/soothe, etc. [Robert wrote] > 'ether' [borrowed word] - 'either' [native word] > 'thigh' [non-pronoun] - 'thy' [pronoun] > 'wreath' [noun] - 'wreathe' [verb] > 'sooth' [noun] - 'soothe' [verb] Both here (and in your previous posts) you are marking way too many words in English as "borrowed". There are many words in English that are clearly marked as "borrowed" in the usage of most speakers (you mentioned 'padre', for example), but you are not at all careful in drawing the line between words that are perceived and used as borrowed terms and words that have been completely Anglicized. Should we mark 'copper', 'mint', 'mile' and 'church' as "borrowed"? Or how about 'seal (the animal)', 'auk', 'herring', and 'sea'? After a thousand years, borrowed words will have suffered one of two fates generally: 1) they will be so few in number that they will have been completely adapted to the borrowing language's phonology so that they are no longer identifiable as borrowed words, or 2) they will be so many in number that they will have changed the phonological structure of the borrowing language and might be identifiable to a linguist as an old borrowing, but to no native speaker. The latter is the case in English with much of our borrowed vocabulary. Take, for example, -(o)logy. It follows a Greek stress pattern. Originally, it was borrowed and only used with Greek stems. It soon was also used with Latin stems, but we can now say that -ology is completely part of the English "native" vocabulary because it is productive with any kind of stem--whether of Greek, Latin, English, or Hindustani origin. One needs only to listen to college students talk for any length of time to hear myriads of -ology words. It's a productive native suffix now. To do a phonological analysis of a language based on establishing an artificial distinction between ancient borrowings and so-called "native" words is weak, at best. If your only criteria for linking [th] and [dh] as allophones of a single phoneme in MODERN English is a morphophonemic rule that hasn't been productive for over a thousand years, and a distinction between very old borrowed words and "native" words, then you haven't proven the relationship. There is, indeed, a diachronic relationship between the two, and the two were, indeed, allophones of a single phoneme in Old English. But in Modern English, the two have split into two phonemes. [I wrote] >> However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic >> and the historical changes that have further obscured them in >> Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like >> minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head' >> and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair. >> However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively. (The = is a >> phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop. >> It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the >> historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.) >> There are a bundle of these: [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara] >> 'uncle' /ata/, etc. [Robert wrote] > Fascinating. Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this > phoneme [=]? Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic > realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal > pair. It just blocks some normal phonetic change. I'm sorry, John, > but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to > explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning > environment that prevented it has been lost historically. I'll tell > you what: Let's assume that English has a phoneme (let's call it [=] > just for consistency) that prevents an intervocalic dental spirant > from being voiced. Now let's insert this phoneme in a word like > 'ether' which shows an unvoiced intervocalic dental spirant /i:=ther/. > Good -- now we no longer have a minimal pair 'ether' - 'either'. Now > let's assume that English inserts this phoneme in all loanwords that > have an unvoiced dental spirant in a voiced environment. Voila -- a > phonetic environment that explains why loanwords have unvoiced > intervocalic [th]. Now all we need is a rule that says /=th/ --> > [dh] /__ m# and all intervocalic [th] in English is accounted for by > phonological rules. Hey, this is fun. Well, Robert, you've fallen into the trap that countless other non-Numicists have blundered into. But it is also illustrative of how different your morphophonemic evidence for lumping [th]/[dh] in English is from the Comanche problem at hand. Here's some very basic data to show that /=/ has a phonemic status. 1) Start with these noun stems which are representative of the entire body of nominal stems: [waa] 'cedar', [pyjy] 'duck', and [tyhyja] 'deer' 2) Now add the postposition /-pa/ 'on' to each of them: [waahpa] 'on the cedar', [pyjypa] 'on the duck', and [tyhyjava] 'on the deer'. Notice how the phonetic realization is different for each of these (remember that each of these words represents a class of nouns that operate exactly the same way). 3) Now add the postposition /-tu/ 'through' to each of them: [waahtu] 'through the cedar', [pyjytu] 'through the duck', and [tyhyjaru] 'through the deer'. Notice how the initial consonants of each of these suffixes changes in the same ways on the same stems. 4) Now incorporate each of these nouns on the verbal stem /-pa'i/ 'have': [waahpa'i] 'have a cedar', [pyjypa'i] 'have a duck', and [tyhyjava'i] 'have a deer' 5) Now compound each of these nouns with the nominal /puku/ 'pet': [waahpuku] 'pet cedar' (think bonzai), [pyjypuku] 'pet duck', and [tyhyjavuku] 'pet deer' By now you should realize that this is not some feature of the second element, but a feature of the stem that causes the initial consonant of the second element to be preaspirated, nonlenited, and lenited. Unlike the voicing of /th/ to [dh], it is fully productive in (at least preobsolescent) Comanche. There is something following each of these nominal stems which is neutralized in word final position. From Shoshoni evidence, we know that these "final features" are -C (an undifferentiated consonant that causes gemination in Shoshoni and preaspiration in Comanche), -n or -= (prenasalization in Shoshoni, a nonlenited stop in Comanche), and zero (allows lenition in both Shoshoni and Comanche). Now this does bring up an important point that I'm sure you'll agree with. There is not a clear boundary line that demarcates when a phoneme has split or when morphophonemic distinctions have ceased productivity or when any number of changes have finally and irreversibly taken place. Comanche is a very clear borderline case. The phonemic status of = (Shoshoni /n/) is not completely black or white. Such is also the case with the phonemic split between [th] and [dh]. (Now's the part where we disagree.) Because of the fully productive nature of the (morpho)phonemic final features in Comanche (including /=/), they must be set up as phonemes in the language, although admitting that their life expectancy is low. Because of the completely non-productive nature of the old morphophonemic processes which gave rise to [th] versus [dh], because [th] in [dh]'s environments has become firmly fixed by old loan words that have become nativized, and because the voicing environments for [dh] have been lost without the subsequent devoicing of [dh] to [th], then we must set up two phonemes in Modern English--/th/ and /dh/, although admitting that they are only recently distinguishable from one another. There was a whole lot more in Robert's last post, but it really just reiterates what has been said before. What got my goat in his first post was the comment that (not quoting directly), "No one doubts that Modern English [th] and [dh] represent allophones of the same phoneme." I doubt it, and quite seriously. I also realize that there are multiple levels of "phonemic analysis" as represented by points of view ranging from pure SPE (where much emphasis is placed on the "native"-"nonnative" distinction between vocabulary) to the more structuralist approaches. Perhaps when we respond to Pat and other non-professionals who occassionaly tug our chain, we can remember that professional linguists may all be walking in a westerly direction, but we're not necessarily arm-in-arm and keeping in step. :) John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Apr 26 06:50:28 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (=?iso-8859-1?B?R+Fib3IgU+FuZGk=?=) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:20:28 +0530 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Robert Whiting's posting quoted below was in response to, and quoted from, a previous message from John McLaughlin dated 13 Apr 2000. I have added the proper attribution where needed. --rma ] On Saturday, 22 April, 2000 Robert Whiting wrote: Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there [ JMcL wrote:] >> [Robert Whiting] >> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to >> establish two sounds as separate phonemes. I am entering this debate somewhat late, but I do have strong opinions on it. In my view, the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where "either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. Of course, other pairs like thy/thigh, this'll/thistle etc. will reinforce this analysis. You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Imagine writing a description of the English sound system, say of the "General American" dialect. If you don't accept the phonemicity of /dh/, you will presumably provide a list of eight fricatives: /f/ /v/ /th/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ Next you will say that some of these come in voiceless/voiced pairs: /f/ - /v/, /s/ - /z/ and /sh/ - /zh/. One (/h/) is always voiceless. Finally, there is a curious phoneme /th/, which is voiceless initially (except in function words) and in word-final position in nouns (bath) and adjectives (uncouth), but voiced between vowels (except when not), after consonants (further), and in word-final position in verbs (bathe). Words of foreign origin (as if native speakers cared) would have their own rules (Athens, anthem). No doubt other sub-rules could be added, ad infinitum. Now why would this analysis be superior to one that said that English had nine fricatives (/f/ /v/ /th/ /dh/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ )? Here you need no distributional rules, just a specification of the articulation of each phoneme: voiceless labiodental fricative etc. [snip] > No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that either > requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate phonemes. > I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and how the evidence > proves it one way or the other. [ JMcL wrote:] >> The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is >> no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes >> (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the >> same footing as other phonemes in the language). > I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or /oj/ > occur only in certain classes of words or only as morphophonemic > alternants? Show me that in all the words where /zh/ occurs that /zh/ > limits or restricts the meanings that it can have and I will grant you > the point. It is said that /ng/ only occurs in word final position, > but even this is not true (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be > difficult to establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: > places where these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be > predicted by rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the > point. [GS] Once you accept nonphonetic conditioning factors, there is no end to the elimination of phonemes from a system. Take two of your examples above: /ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why not?) in final position after /n/, and before the derivative suffix -er (as in "singer"), although not before the comparative -er (as in "longer"). There remain some exceptions, like the name of my favourite Canadian city (Vancouver is pronounced /vaenku:v at r/ by locals), but this is clearly a loanword, or (maybe) two morphemes: Van Couver. /zh/ - who needs it? Using the logic of reductionism, we shall elaborate a set of rules to account for this sound: (1) It is an allophone of the phoneme /j/, occurring in loanwords from French (genre, garage, mirage). The phoneme /j/ in native words like 'edge' /ej/ remains [j], whereas this pronunciation does not occur in loanwords. Where it does, one may always set up a new word category: loanwords that have been fully assimilated to the sound structure of English. This will take care of troublesome words like jet, gene and magenta. (2) In words like azure, seisure and invasion, /zh/ is derived from the sequence of phonemes z + y. (/azyu:r/, /si:zy at r/ and /inveyzy at n/). Come to think of it, didn't Chomsky and Halle analyze English along these lines, to get back at those dreadful structuralists of the 50's? With sufficient ingenuity, I am sure we can come up with rules to eliminate other phonemes from English: /v/ and /@r/ (bird, fern, word) come immediately to mind. My main point, I hope readers realize, is that this kind of analysis is not very helpful. A simple description of the phonemic structure of a language should account for all differences that are potentially distinctive, irrespective of the morphology, semantics or etymological provenance of the words in question. It is a noteworthy fact that there tend to be correlations between certain phonemes and certain grammatical and semantic criteria. In English, /dh/ starts many function words and /th/ never does - so what? The phoneme /h/ (or the cluster /hw/, depending on the dialect) starts many interrogatives (where, which, what, when) while /k/ never does - is this a reason to bunch them together under one phoneme? [snip] [ JMcL wrote:] >> [Me] >> The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >> assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. > Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you saying that > allophones automatically become separate phonemes when the > phonological conditioning environment that maintains their allophonic > identity is lost? And that they are phonemes even if they never > contrast in an environment that can't be predicted, so long as the > basis for predicting the environment is not phonological? [GS] Yes, that's how it should be. Once the conditioning factor is lost, we have separate phonemes. German (+Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) umlauts, Southern British /e@/ (bare, care) and French nasal vowels come to mind as examples. You can probably invent a series of complex rules to eliminate these from the inventories of phonemes, explain the exceptions as loanwords, analogies or whatever, but what would be the purpose of this? > Now if this is what you believe, I am not saying that it is wrong. It > is more a matter of how one sees the interaction of the various parts > of language. If the determination of phonemes is an entirely > phonological process, then it is quite correct. But if other areas > or language can affect phonology, then it is not necessarily so. > Again, it is a question of how much one area of language can affect > the others. A matter of where you draw your lines and how you make > your definitions. [snip] > I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' so > it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and [pavi] > aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words are both > native in Comanche). 'Thigh' - 'thy' is just a historical accident. > You say that synchronicity demands that [th] and [dh] be separate > phonemes and that non-productive forms cannot be used for synchronic > phonemicization and then you give me evidence based on loanwords and > obsolete forms. Not good enough. To use someone else's analysis of Comanche as supporting evidence for your analysis of English is not very convincing. If I analyzed Comanche, I would probably accept the p/v contrast as phonemic, even if the contrast existed only intervocally. I don't know Comanche, and I would be interested to hear how it borrows words from English that begin with p- and v-, respectively. Loans from Spanish are of lesser value, as /v/ does not exist in that language. It is quite common in language change for certain new phonemes to exist at first only in specific environments. Subsequently, the new phoneme is introduced into other environments by borrowing (from other languages or from other dialects of the same language) or by processes other than the one that gave rise to the new phoneme in the first place. Examples: 1. /v/, /z/, and /j/ in English. These phonemes arose from internal /f/, /s/ and /g > y/ in Old English under certain conditions (live, cheese, hedge), and they were introduced initially later on in loanwords (very, zero, jet) and from dialects (vat, vixen). 2. /b/, /d/ and /g/ in my native Hungarian. These phonemes are the natural development of the Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) internal clusters /-mp-/, /-nt-/ and /-nk-/, respectively. On the other hand, they should not exist initially, as there is no regular phonetic change that could produce them from PFU etyma. Yet Hungarian is full of words beginning with voiced stops: they are loanwords from Turkic, Slavic etc., and there are even a few words of FU origin where initial *p- and *t- changed into *b- and *d- ("sporadic sound change"). There exist as well curious cases where an allophone acquires phonemic status ONLY because of the introduction of loanwords into a language. I am thinking of Japanese, where the phoneme /h/ is pronounced as the voiceless bilabial fricative (normally denoted as the Greek letter phi, but let's write it [ph] here) before the vowel /u/ (the Hepburn transliteration is used for the gloss, followed by a phonemic and phonetic transcription): Fujimori /huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori], fune /hune/ 'boat' is [phune]. Nowadays, loanwords from English are introducing [ph] into environments other than pre-/u/, e.g. ftku [pho:ku] 'fork', fairu [phairu] 'file'. According to my thinking, a new phoneme is being born in Japanese: the next generation of speakers will not necessarily know that these are "loanwords", so any phonetic rule based on their being loanwords will be purely ad-hoc: the only reason for labelling some words as loanwords will be in order to account for the presence of "unusual" occurrences of sounds like [ph] not before /u/, [sh] before /e/ etc. It is better, IMHO, to allow for the addition of new phonemes into the structure. Best wishes to all, Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail_com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Apr 26 12:02:58 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 15:02:58 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <006201bfac94$4639e5c0$0354113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [Patrick Ryan:] > It suffices that pairs like /hwer/ ('where') and /wer/ ('wear') exist. But, > I believe we must have at least *one* minimal pair for a phoneme to be > established. There are two mistakes here: 1. One minimal pair, such as above, does not establish phonemes - it establishes an opposition in a non-contrastive environment. A phoneme is the sum of its oppisitons: what makes something a phoneme is that it is in opposition to -all- the other phonemes. You can establish phonemes only in the context of the whole phonological system. To take an example: Finnish has the consonant phonemes /ptksvjlrmn/ (plus /?d/ in some dialects and idiolects, disregarded here). Now, the following is a minimal pair: Finn. kala 'fish' vs. pala 'piece' But pointing this out does not establish phonemes /p/ and /k/ for Finnish. It does not show that /k/ is a phoneme distinct from /t/, /s/, /v/ etc. You would have to show that -all- the phonemes contrast with each other. In order to establish /p/ as a phoneme, you'd have to point out e.g. the following minimal pairs / series: puu 'tree' vs. luu 'bone' vs. kuu 'moon' vs. muu 'else' vs. suu 'mouth' palo 'burning' vs. talo 'house' vs. valo 'light' vs. salo 'woodland' vs. jalo 'noble' pata 'pot' vs. rata 'track' vs. nata 'snot' You have established the Finnish phonemes only when you have shown that every one of them is in opposition with every other. It is a different thing to demonstrate phonemic contrast using a minimal pair and establish a phoneme - the latter requires multiple minimal pairs (if demonstrated through minimal pairs, see below). 2. It must be once again stressed that for many languages it is impossible to establish all the contrasts using minimal pairs - this is precisely the case with English /sh/ vs. /zh/, which was discussed earlier. The phonemes contrast with each other even though there are no minimal pairs, because their distribution cannot be accounted for with a rule. I.e., they show contrast in non-contrastive environments (vicious vs. vision etc.). Regards, Ante Aikio From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 25 12:37:51 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:37:51 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: > From: "petegray" > Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 17:47:00 +0100 > Subject: Re: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) > A thought: If an English speaker is presented with a new word pronounced > with /V:dh/ at the end, does she or he hear it as a verb? And would he or > she make the similar form ending /Vth/ into the corresponding noun? > Apart from wild guesses, does anyone happen to know of any evidence? Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include "hath", "doth"), and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in some dialects). Max ____________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B. Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk ____________________________________________________________ From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:36:04 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:36:04 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <009b01bfac6c$6ac36920$bac601d5@xpoxkjlf>; from "petegray" at Apr 21, 100 8:06 Message-ID: > Jens said: >> I believe the facts of IE are plain in themselves ... A voiced value of >> /H3/ is demanded by *pi'be/o- 'drink'; > Steady on! This word is far from clear, and is, I believe, the only > evidence for voicing in H3. Can we really construct our theories on one > isolated unclear word? The two other examples of H3-based voicing in PIE are 1) proto-Celtic word *abon 'river' < PIE *H2ep-H3on ~ 'that, which has the running water' (where *H3on is a "grundsprachliches Posessivsuffix") 2) notoriously known greek _ogdoos_ '8th' < PIE (H)ok^tH3u-H2o-s (reconstruction according to Rix GrGr, 172) The second example is even more suspicious than the first, because in greek, especially in the system of numerals there're so many voicings, which are hard to account for, cf. '7th' hebdomos. However, i do believe, too, that in the terms of distinctive features H3 should be characterized as [+voiced], (as well as [+labialized]), given voice was distinctive for PIE at all :-), which is a different issue. Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:36:23 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:36:23 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: ; from "Herb Stahlke" at Apr 14, 100 4:20 Message-ID: > Lehmann, in his Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, p. 107, > attributes the term to a Semiticist, Hermann Moeller, in 1879. He mentions > only a note and does not give a citation. > Herb Stahlke To be precise: H. Moeller. 1880. "Zur Conjugation. KunZa und das t-preteritum. Excurs: Die Entstehung des o" In: Beitraege zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Bd. 7. S. 492, Anm.2 "wahrscheinlich gutturale von der art der semitischen, A = alef, der tonlose gutturale verschlusslaut und E wahrscheinlich der entsprechende toenende verschlusslaut". (In 1917 Moeller adopted the idea of H. Sweet, which dates back to the same 1880, that E might have been a "glottal thrill") It's worth being noted that the two most widespread approaches towards the determination of the phonetic realisation of Hs both go back as far as 1880: the "semitic" variant (glottal stop, pharyngeal and the labialized pharyngeal), for which see e.g. Keiler, Hamp and Beekes, and which is what Moeller advocated for. But in his earlier article dated the same 1880 Moeller put forth the term "kehlkopsspirans". It is of interest, that different scholars have been referring to the facts of Arabic and, generally, semitic languages to witness the developments, which in IE studies are attributed to laryngeals. But even in Arabic the effects produced by the neighbouring fricatives (of the type Jens Rasmussen so lucidly was writing about) are nearly the same as those of neighbouring ayn, ghayn or hamsa. (I have to bring my disclaimers beforehand, my knowledge of Arabic is that of the beginner, and my data of the subject is secondary) Cf. before ayn (`) Impf. yad.a'u 'he lays' from wad.a`a, while it is /i/ that is required by the "naw`-un", see yajlisu from jalasa. But the same case is yad_bah.u from d_abah.a in the proximity of /h./ Or in the akkadian language: 'dust' is epiru, while in hebrew the counterpart is `a:fa:r (a>e after ayn); but 'father-in-law' is emu in akkadian, while in hebrew it is h.am. In akkadian 'take!' is akhuz, while **ukhuz would be expected. These examples may be multiplied; on the other hand, some of them may not stand a severe critisism of an experienced specialist in afrasian languages; still, it can be proved, that fricatives in semitic languages cause the same sound changes as sounds of glottal articulation do. And that gives a point to them. On the other hand, it is sometimes referred to, that afrasian "laryngeals" could be vocalised (at a certain stage of their history). And, generally, it seems more probable for the sounds of an "unstable laryngeal articulation" to be vocalised. But fricatives can be syllabic, too, e.g. in berber languages. A second point. (Though for the problem of syllabic Hs anaptyxis is a plausible decision, too). Thus, to the best of my knowledge and understanding, the model based on the "semitic laryngeals" has no real advantage over the system of fricatives; while there's a couple of pieces of evidence more, which force the researcher to the "fricative"-conclusion. Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev P.S. The funny thing is that greek o-mikron-letter has as its source the phoenician grapheme, which designated exactly ayn! I am not sure, may be it was W.Allen, who first paid attention to that. From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Mon Apr 24 22:38:15 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 01:38:15 +0300 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >So, my current "best guess" for the laryngeals is something like yours, >/x', x, x^w/, or /h, x, x^w/. (With /x/ being a *back* fricative, and /x'/ >or /h/ being less far back). As the last but not least argument for fricative nature of PIE laryngeals it is commonly claimed that, being /x/s, laryngeals would pattern the three rows of tectals (if these are in fact three :-> ); and that is why a quality of a palatized counterpart of H2 is assigned to H1. I take the liberty to expound some views on this tangled topic. On the one hand, if the system is /x', x, x^w/ this would account for the fact that H2 is the most widespread -- it is thus the least marked, as to the set of its distinctive features. But in the course of the development of the laryngeal theory H1 came to be held for the least marked of the three, as it causes no colouring at all. And then the system /h, x, x^w/ seems better: then the phonemic status of H1 as the least marked is not violated (the putative parallelism to tectals could be omitted, being itself an obscure matter). But -- the decision, that H1 doesn't colour an adjacent vowel largely (if not wholly) depends on the H2O problem. And if one believes that /o/ resisted the colouring by adjacent H2, it should then resist being colouring by H1, too. (And discussing H3o is needless). Then the conclusion is that /o/ is not coloured by any of the laryngeals. And as the cardinal /a/ is extremely rare and doesn't influence this logics much, since in the examples, where it is present, it doesn't neighbour any of the Hs. And then it's impossible to say, that H1 doesn't produce ANY colouring-effect: if within the system of PIE this sound could theoretically affect 2 vowels, and we know, that one of these resisted being affected, and we do not know for sure, if what we write as /e/ was indeed [e] -- claiming that H1 makes no colouring is impossible, isn't it? And then there's no need to account for its "weakness" by assigning to this phoneme the "weakest" phonetic realisation [h]. Then /x', x, x^w/ is, finally, the one set, i prefer. As to my position, I personally do believe, that H2o resulted in o; i guess, there're some 12 examples, like orkh'eomai - arkh'os, 'onkos - ank'ule:, 'ago: - 'ogmos, 'akros - okr'is... And i do believe that the traditional PIE /e/ could have been something like [a[, /o/ being [@], a kind of a Pulleblankianism. Any comments? Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 25 12:50:27 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:50:27 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: -- Begin original message -- > From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen > Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 18:00:15 +0200 (MET DST) [snip] > Even so, I cannot dismiss your suggestion of phonetic variation - that > could even have been there from the start, meaning that [h] may be just > one of the manifestations of /H1/, which would still leave room for [x^] > being another. I do not believe phonetic typology has reached a point > enabling it to exclude any such thing. And incidentally, the Greek > reflexes of CRH1C with /-Re:-/ are easier to udnerstand from [x^] than > from [h], since the latter would simply add voicelessness, but not > redirect the articulation to any other location than where the sonants are > themselves - and they all produce [a] when given an undisturbed course. Variation along these lines, whether allophonic or socially condiditoned (or "free") seems very plausible. Spanish /x/ is [x] in many dialects, [h] in others. In Welsh, [x], [X] (uvular) [h] (and zero) are variants of the same phoneme. In Old English [h] and [x] may have been allophones of the same phoneme. In the Spanish and OE case, [x] > [h] seems to be involved, but in the Welsh case it's more complicated, since one source of [h] is */s/. Max