Refining early Basque criteria

[Patrick C. Ryan]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Georg" <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:06 AM

[PR previously]

>>It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children
>>before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view?

[SG]
>Yes, this is incorrect in my view. You will not repeat that keeping your
>moputh shut and simply turn on your vocal cords ("/mmm/") is such a
>difficult thing that it invariable comes after, say, /p/, /ts/ or /r/, will
>you ?

[PR asks]
Aside from the idea that /mmmm/ is not a traditional syllable, is this, in
fact, what studies of early childhood speech learning have documented?

[SG]
>A different question is, however, whether this very simple, let's
>call it an "articulatory gesture", is really a "consonant". It might be
>sensible to reserve this technical term for non-vocalic articulatory
>gestures *when they form part of linguistically meaningful items*, which is
>certainly not the case for infants who first try out their articulatory
>tracts.

>So, again, the nasal /m/ is articulated *very* early, and it's association
>with whatever semantic content - done by the parents, of course - is an
>artefact of adults fancying that the child is actually speaking to them.

[PR]
All well and good. But if we assume --- as we need to for this argument to
cohere --- that the FIRST syllable produced by the child should be the one
which the mother assigns to herself, then "*very* early" is just not early
enough.

[SG]
>At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's babbling.
>Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds produced
>by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/
>alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/,
>/n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.:  Phonological
>Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983).

[PR]
Where is the glottal stop in this list?

[PR previously]
>>All you have written is, of course, very plausible.

[SG]
>Yes, it very obviously is ;-)

[PR previously]
>>But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really
>>address my argument, I do not think.

>>I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather
>>*ama.

[SG]
>Some societies conventionalize the fully reduplicated form /mama/, some
>don't. Some languages do know initial labials, some don't (and among these,
>some may allow for such a thing in a marked nursery term, some won't). Some
>cultures chose to conventionalize /deda/ for "mother", reserving /mama/ for
>"father". Some will conventionalize a one-syllable /ma/, some won't. When
>it comes to the act of conventionalizing, which is to be kept sharply apart
>from the "pre-speech-act" of babbling, the phonotactic rules of the
>language the poor child is about to learn from now on, do play a role
>(after all, the happy parents of a Tlinkit child do of course think that
>their napper is talking Tlinkit to them, and not Abkhaz, so even when the
>little one constantly babbles /mama/ they'll assume for convenience' sake
>that it actually wanted to say /ama/ [for argument's sake I assume that
>Tlinkit is one of the labialless languages of the American NW,. and that
>/ama/ is "mother" there; if this is not the case, take any language, where
>it is, and replace this example]). There may be other reasons, apart from
>phonotactics, and in some individual cases they may be hard to tell. So
>what ?

[PR]
Frankly, you are not too bad at childish babbling yourself! (:-O)

Languages lacking initial labials are fairly rare. And while your proposal
might be of some interest in connection with them, IE does *not* lack
initial labials; and we find the word *Hama. Would you propose that *Hama is
a loanword into IE from a language lacking (initial) labials?

[PR previously]
>>Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not.

[SG]
>This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-).

[PR]
Excuse. The phrase is "Ralf-Stefan's understanding of the application of
linguistic principles to this problem".

[PR previously]
>>While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the
>>frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty,
>>be derived from it. Do you not agree?

[SG]
>Of course, such words may change, once they have become conventionalized
>items of a language, they may be subject to any systematic change of the
>sound structure of this language. They may, however, and this is the point,
>why such terms shouldn't be allowed to play a decisive role in any
>classificatory work, escape this, either remaining stable in spite of
>sound-changes in other parts of the lexicon, or be innovated over and over
>again to maintain their emotional connotations (or, for that matter, in the
>case of imitative words, their iconicity).

[PR]
Just when do you believe *?ama was "conventionalized"?

[SG]
>PS: Shoot, "mother" is /tla/ in Tlinkit, so think up a different example ...

[PR]
Of course, this fact is completely immaterial to the discussion.

<snip>

Pat

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