From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Oct 2 14:31:50 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 08:31:50 -0600 Subject: Linguasphere Message-ID: Besides being a native speaker of one, I'm mostly on on-looker to the IE languages, so I'd like to know what people think about the I-E section of David Dalby's recently published Linguasphere volume. I've got some corrections to bring to his attention in the section of languages I work on (Numic of Uto-Aztecan), so I'd specifically like the impressions you might have about his decisions on "outer languages" versus "inner languages" in respect to mutual intelligibility issues. Thanks. (My copy is numbered 052, so I hope that at least some of you represent copies 1-51.) John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Oct 2 17:20:44 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:20:44 -0600 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" In-Reply-To: <39350822DFB@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 May 2000, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Latin `do, dare' continues the IE root {d-H3} = Greek {dido:mi} = "give". But > many of its supposed compounds, e.g. `addo' = "add", `abdo' = "hide", have > nothing to do with transfer of ownership and look more like as if made from a > root meaning "put". Thus I suspect that in pre-literary Italic times there > was confusion with the outcome of PIE {dheH1} = "put" (= Greek {tithe:mi}). I suppose "adficio, adficere" would have to be a later formation then. Etymologically it would be the same as "addo, addere". And this pre-literary Italic would have to be pretty early, if I am not mistaken, for the change to /f/ not to have occurred, though perhaps theresome evidence I am unaware of for this being late. Furthermore, I am not sure about the semantics being so strained. Note that subtraction, like addition, does not necessarily involve ownership, yet this does not stop us from using expressions like "take away" ("take" being the opposite of "give" to describe. Perhaps "give" was re-analyzed as being almost a motion verb. For a rough parallel, one may note how the Celtic languages (Welsh anyway) use "come with" to mean "bring" (certainly realted in meaning to "give") and "go with" to mean "take". DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Oct 2 17:32:58 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:32:58 -0600 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" In-Reply-To: <39350822DFB@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: Addendum: I should have used "afficio", which is I believe the normal form, rather than "adficio", to stop everyone from saying "Of course "adficio" is a reformation, otherwise it would be "afficio".' By the way, for those of you who may vaguely remember me, I am now Dr. White (though still unemployable as ever), so I suppose if I do not act like an idiot (now there's a big if), I deserve to be treated with respect ... DLW From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 01:39:37 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 20:39:37 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE Message-ID: Dear Dennis and IEists: [ moderator snip ] I believe *sreu- is probably an s-mobile formation from *ereu-, 'to move swiftly'; *ser-, from which it has been derived, is rather, IMHO, an s-mobile of the simpler form *3. er-. I have written a short essay on s-mobile which some list-members may want to take a look at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/IE-s-mobile.htm I believe "when s-mobile is combined with r-, a /-t-/ is inserted [s-t-r-] for euphony and ease of pronunciation: e.g. *2. streig-, "stiff", from *s- + (reig^-), "stretch out".) In the case of *sreu-, if we did not assume a euphonic insertion of -t- in *sreu- to produce 'stream', then we would have to reconstruct *s(t)reu-, which I think should be done. I suspect the key to this puzzle is that *s + *Herew -> *sreu- but *s + *reu- -> *streu-. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From stevegus at aye.net Tue Oct 3 03:25:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:25:37 -0400 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: > 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. My own idiolect of English may contain such a phantom phoneme. 'Whiter' is to my ear distinguishable from 'wider,' because the diphthong of the stressed syllable, ordinarily conceived of as /ai/, differs in quality. Like most North Americans, I have intervocalic /t/ > /d/, in both words. But the unvoiced /t/ of "whiter" shortens the first element of the diphthong to something approaching schwa, where "wider" is immune because it always had a voiced consonant; so they come out /w#ider/ and /waider/, respectively. -- Dantur opes nullis nunc, nisi divitibus. --- Martial From edsel at glo.be Tue Oct 3 11:00:04 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 13:00:04 +0200 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 1:51 PM [snip]. ... > 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 modern 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. [Ed Selleslagh] Just a remark concerning this example only: In Wallonia, the French speaking south of Belgium, local people, especially in the regions where the Walloon 'dialect' (actually a separate language, vaguely similar to French but with lots of different words and phonetics) is still spoken, still aspirate the 'h-aspiré' very much (in particular within words, like the name of the village of Jalhay) like in Dutch or German. Maybe this is a lingering old influence from Germanic in Normandy (Scandinavian) and Wallonia (Frankish). In Belgian French the distinction between 'je donnai' and 'je donnais' is usually quite clear: the first one is often pronounced as if it ended in 'e-accent aigu'. But on French radio and TV you hear more and more e.g. 'donnerai' and 'donnerais' being pronounced identically. So I wonder about the direction of the evolution. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 03:20:28 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 22:20:28 -0500 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- > From: Stanley Friesen > Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 6:54 PM [ moderator snip ] [SF] > 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)! [PR] I do think a case *might* be made in this case for derivational processes as a kind of inflection but I will not quibble since I do think that derivation is a more appropriate term for what is happening in 'sooth->soothe'. Now, the question is, do you consider IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or derivational? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 04:32:24 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:32:24 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- > From: Dr. John E. McLaughlin > Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 4:05 AM > 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. [PR] This may well be true but I have a question in connection with it. When I pronounce a word like /tith/, the primary difference between it and /tidh/ seems to me to be that the voicing of the /dh/ requires a voiced onset; even more sensibly when stops are involved: /bat/ vs. /ba(uh)d/. This is particularly clear when an initial voiced stop is compared with a voiceless stop: /(uh)damp/ vs. /tamp/. So, I am wondering if /tidh/ may not have about the same length /i/ as /tith/ but with the onset somehow being reckoned as part of the 'length' in /ti(u)dh/? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Oct 3 05:11:12 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:11:12 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <20000426082023.29305.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Wow, this debate happened so long ago that I can hardly remember it. I'm so glad were back on-line. Thanks Mr. Moderator. Gabor Sandi wrote (in a long post on the phonemic or not distinction of English /th/ and /dh/): > 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. Comanche always reanalyzes English loans with initial /v/, /f/ or /b/ with an initial /p/. Thus, Comanche paisee' 'five cents', paare' /paate'/ 'barley', piic /piitsi/ 'beets' (can't find an example of E /v/ -> C /p/ right now, but I've seen it before, just can't remember which word list I saw it in). John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Oct 3 19:55:24 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 13:55:24 -0600 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <2000Apr25.013623@AN3039.spb.edu> Message-ID: In general I agree with Nikolaev's posting. If we look at the IE sound-system, what is missing (if we have no particular predilection for exotica) is fricatives. And for fricatives, esp. voiced, to intergrade (over time) with vowels or semi-vowels is hardly unknown. One may cite Greek /autos/ -> /aftos/, or OE palatal /g/ -> /y/ (English value). And as I said long ago, there may well be a connection between the famous /b/-gap and the apparent voicing of H3, if this was sucked into the gap, so to speak. I think I will dig up my earlier (mercifully brief) writings on the subject and inflict them on the assemblage. DLW From sarima at friesen.net Wed Oct 4 05:41:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 22:41:40 -0700 Subject: Questions on Mallory & Adams Encyclopedia In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have been reading _The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture_ by Mallory and Adams, and I have some questions and thoughts. I will start with a simple one. In their archeological entries, do they use calibrated or "raw" radiocarbon dates? Others to follow. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Oct 4 05:36:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 22:36:04 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <017b01c02ce8$f86b72c0$9bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:20 PM 10/2/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >Now, the question is, do you consider IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or >derivational? I think enough cases exist where there is an o-form as a noun or adjective, and an e-form as a verbal root to at least suggest occasional derivational use of the distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Oct 4 07:22:37 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 01:22:37 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <01d101c02cf3$03713600$9bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [I wrote] >> 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. > [PR] > This may well be true but I have a question in connection with it. > When I pronounce a word like /tith/, the primary difference > between it and > /tidh/ seems to me to be that the voicing of the /dh/ > requires a voiced onset; > even more sensibly when stops are involved: /bat/ vs. /ba(uh)d/. > This is particularly clear when an initial voiced stop is > compared with a > voiceless stop: /(uh)damp/ vs. /tamp/. > So, I am wondering if /tidh/ may not have about the same > length /i/ as /tith/ > but with the onset somehow being reckoned as part of the > 'length' in /ti(u)dh/? Take it up with the phoneticians. They all agree that English vowels are measurably longer in front of voiced sounds than in front of voiceless ones. It's not the onset they're measuring. John McLaughlin From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Oct 4 11:32:20 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 12:32:20 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Max Wheeler writes: [on non-verbs in final edh] > Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? > These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. Not all of these work for me, but most of them do, and I can add the noun 'edh' (or 'eth'), another name for barred-d. > I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include "hath", "doth"), > and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in some dialects). Agreed, except that certain nouns in final theta can also be used as verbs. A common example is the verb 'pith', as in 'pith a frog' (in a biology lab). This is derived from the noun 'pith'. A second occurs, a little marginally, in the verb 'mouth off', which, in my experience, always has theta. A third is the peculiarly British use of 'bath' as a verb, as in 'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American English, and perhaps in all other varieties of English. A fourth is the verb 'sheath', which is now rather common as an alternative to the traditional 'sheathe'. An extremely marginal fifth, which strictly only qualifies here in non-rhotic accents, is the British use of 'earth' as a verb, as in 'earth the TV set' (= US 'ground the TV set'). As an aside, I have just noticed that OED2 cites the very obscure noun 'mouthing', meaning 'entrance to a mine', with theta only -- perhaps somewhat unexpectedly. Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with theta, in my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does anyone want to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From hwhatting at hotmail.com Wed Oct 4 16:03:10 2000 From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 16:03:10 CEST Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] >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. I would like to suggest another solution to the problem outlined above. I strongly agree with the opinion of Gabor Sandi, posted in this discussion, on that for establishing whether two sounds are phonemes or allophones, only phonetic conditioning of their distribution (as against, e.g., semantic conditioning - the fact that initial /dh/ is restricted to pronouns in English is no argument against its phoneme status, and that the /th/-/dh/ distinction serves to distinguish nouns and verbs is, in my eyes, a strong argument in favour of these being diffrerent phonemes) ought to serve as a basis. The same also ought to apply to establishing phonemes: we should not establish a phoneme solely on the basis of one phone triggering the use of different forms of affixes. Let4s consider the case of the French article first: The rule is that various French words and morphemes have different forms depending on whether they are followed by a word beginning with a vowel or with a consonant (there are additional syntactical conditions for the choice between these alloforms, but I think I can leave this aside here for simplicity4s sake). Now a group of words, synchronically beginning in a vowel, triggers the alloform used before consonant. (These are mostly non-Romance loanwords which historically began with an /h/ no longer pronounced.)To keep the rule neat, one could of course elevate the "h aspiri" to phoneme status and posit a consonant phoneme /=/ which phonetically is not distinct to Zero, but triggers the pre- consonant alloform of preceding words. But this would mean that we have two phonemes with exactly the same realisation! So wouldn4t it make more sense to say that the choices between the two alloforms are triggered partly by phonetic conditions, and partly bv non-phonetic ones (i.e., there is a class A of words beginning in vowels which triggers alloform 1, and a class B which triggers alloform 2). This may be not as neat, but if we start to establish phonemes out of phonetically non-distinct sounds just because they trigger the choice of different allophones, where to stop? Why not ascribe to French two phonemes /s1/ and /s2/, one of which triggers a change from "al" to "aux" in plural formation and the other one doesn4t? One can do so, of course, but I think this is mixing up description levels and leads to confusion, not clarity. I4m not acquainted with Numic, so what I say now is based on John McLaughlin4s posting in this discussion: "Here's some very basic data to show that /=/ hasa phonemic status.1) Start with these noun stems which are representative of the entire bodyof nominal stems: [waa] 'cedar', [pyjy] 'duck', and [tyhyja] 'deer'2) Now add the postposition /-pa/ 'on' to each of them: [waahpa] 'on thecedar', [pyjypa] 'on the duck', and [tyhyjava] 'on the deer'. Notice howthe phonetic realization is different for each of these (remember that eachof these words represents a class of nouns that operate exactly the sameway).3) Now add the postposition /-tu/ 'through' to each of them: [waahtu]'through the cedar', [pyjytu] 'through the duck', and [tyhyjaru] 'throughthe 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] 'havea 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 secondelement, but a feature of the stem that causes the initial consonant of thesecond element to be preaspirated, nonlenited, and lenited. Unlike thevoicing 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 thatthese "final features" are -C (an undifferentiated consonant that causesgemination 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 splitor when morphophonemic distinctions have ceased productivity or when anynumber of changes have finally and irreversibly taken place. Comanche is avery clear borderline case. The phonemic status of = (Shoshoni /n/) is notcompletely black or white." My impression is that Comanche is similar to the case of French "h aspiri" - historically distinct phonemes have merged into /0/, and so a rule for choosing allomorphs based on phonetic conditions has been replaced by a system of words belonging to three declensional classes, which are distinguished by which allomorphs they trigger. Of course, if there are cases where the phonemes -C- and -n- postulated by John McLaughlin are still visible synchronically in stem-final position(maybe before morphemes beginning in a vowel?), then one could take these as the basic stem forms and state the rules for choosing the allomorphs based on phonetical conditions. But then we probably would not need a phoneme /=/ (historically < C). Of course, a "phoneme" /=/ looks like a good shortcut, as it succinctly conveys information ("triggers the follwing set of allomorphs"), especially for a lexical entry. It4s comparable to dictionaries of French distinguishing "h aspiri" from "h muet" by asterisking it. But if we want to keep the levels of description distinct, and to keep synchronical descriptions separate from historical explanation, we should not postulate phonemes in order to formulate rules for the choice of allomorphs. Better to work with declensional classes, and then add a historical explanation of their origins. Best regards, Hans-Werner Hatting From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:22:10 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:22:10 +0100 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" Message-ID: > Latin `do, dare' ..and ..PIE {dheH1} It was strongly argued on this list a few years back that credo was a compound of *dheh1, not of *deh3. There is no reason why other compounds could not also be found in Latin. How -if at all - would compounds of *dheh1 differ in Latin from the outcome of compounds of *deh3? The initial cluster, being now medial, would appear as /d/, the reduplication in the perfect would be identical as -didi, the stem vowel in zero grade forms would be identically /a/ or after reduction /i/ (or /e/ before /r/). What would happen in the present singular? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:07:14 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:07:14 +0100 Subject: Pokorny's Dictionary Message-ID: >Does anyone know how to get a copy of Pokorny's Dictionary? Write or email directly to Francke Verlag, Tubingen (or Basel). You can use your search engine to find their website on the internet. I think it's about 420 DM. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:04:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:04:55 +0100 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE Message-ID: Dennis asks: > how come there > appear to be no *(s)r- roots? Pokorny lists (s)reigh "klettern" and ten other roots in #sr- Peter From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Wed Oct 4 17:07:45 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 12:07:45 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Going back to my original typological question, asked from perspective of a linguist who doesn't do Indo-European, it is precisely this set of fricatives that I find odd. They do, of course, line up by place of articulation with the palatalized velar, velar, and labiovelar stop series, which makes them seem a little more natural, but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even close. Why no labial? Herb Stahlke >>> pie at AN3039.spb.edu 04/24/00 05:38PM >>> 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). [ moderator snip ] Then /x', x, x^w/ is, finally, the one set, i prefer. [ moderator snip ] Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Fri Oct 6 21:45:57 2000 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Moserator) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 14:45:57 -0700 Subject: brief intermission Message-ID: I will be away from my office for the next 10 days, so there will be no mailings from the Indo-European and Nostratic lists till I return. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From edsel at glo.be Thu Oct 5 07:11:27 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 09:11:27 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 1:32 PM [snip] > Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, > a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with theta, in > my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does anyone want > to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) [Ed Selleslagh] I won't claim this isn't fully English, or rather: has become so, but do remember it is originally Greek (from 'katharé:', the pure one, f.nom.sg.); so the rule that Greek theta is always th in English might apply. Ed. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:19:12 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:19:12 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Larry said: > ...'bath' as a verb, as in > 'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American English, > and perhaps in all other varieties of English. It's also common in NZ-speak (which shows strong influence from both UK & USA) > Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, Often also with -th-, despite the dictionaries. (I have never heard it with -dh!) Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:09:06 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:09:06 +0100 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or > >derivational? > o-form as a noun or adjective, > and an e-form as a verbal root Might it not begin as, say, a result of phonetic environment, but in later PIE be used for derivational purposes? This "grammaticalising" of an originally phonetically conditioned variant is known elsewhere in various languages. So the fact that it is used derivationally does not prove it began that way. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Oct 5 14:03:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 09:03:56 -0500 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Am I missing something here? It seems that French aspiré is just a case of /h/ > glottal stop and that the /-s/ of was also glottalized /-s/ > /-S/ > ? /-h/ > /?/ > /0/ perhaps similarly to final <-t> as glottal stop in some varieties of US English compare nigh /nai/ vs. (US dialect) night /nai?/ >On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:33:20 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:33:20 +0100 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" Message-ID: > ...And this > pre-literary Italic would have to be pretty early, if I am not mistaken, > for the change to /f/ not to have occurred, Also because of the perfect form (unless this is influenced by dare). An original compound of *dheh1 could well have a reduplicated zero grade perfect which would appear in Latin as -didi < *ded-ai < *dedh-h2e + -i (cf the Greek tethe:ka with secondary suffix and different grade as always). A later compound of facio is far more likely to have (or could only have) the perfect in -feci. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 15:41:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 16:41:03 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: On this subject it's perhaps worth adding that the deh3 root shows forms in Latin as if from a root *dew-, eg the subjunctives duim, duis etc. Gerhard Meiser ("Historicher Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache" 1998 section 122.3 ) says: An original aorist lies behind "duim "duis" etc. (from do: give) < *dow-i- with suffix -i-, derived from the aorist stem *dow- < *dewh (parallel form to the root *do:, PIE *deh3). The present is found in Faliscan douiat (= det, "let him give"). Is this further evidence of the rounding of h3? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:26:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:26:59 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Why should the laryngeals line up with the allegedly three-fold velar series? Why not with the much more widely attested three-fold stop series (T, D, DH), whatever that was? Peter From jer at cphling.dk Thu Oct 5 14:42:44 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 16:42:44 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: > [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, > x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through > Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even > close. Why no labial? If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY close to Dutch. Jens E. Rasmussen From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Oct 5 23:37:15 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 18:37:15 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Dear Alexander and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander S. Nikolaev" Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 5:36 PM [ moderator snip ] > 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") [PR] Would you mind saying who is proposing -*H3on as an archaic possessive suffix? And if there was such a possessive sufiix, would it not preferably mean 'riverine'? Pat From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Fri Oct 6 15:45:27 2000 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 17:45:27 +0200 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) Message-ID: Peter wrote : >Pokorny lists (s)reigh "klettern" and ten other roots in #sr- This is just the point I'm making : IE dictionaries such as Pokorny and Watkins list several *sC- roots (where C= stop or sonorant) which are ofter related to *sVC- roots with similar or identical 'meanings', e.g. *skei- 'cut'/*sek- 'cut'. But no *(s)r- roots appear in Watkins, even though he gives *sreu- 'flow, move' along with *rei- 'flow'. Given that in Watkin's dictionary, *sek- extensions such as *skei- are listed separately and described as extensions of *sek-', why isn't *sreu- given as an extension of *ser-? Regarding *(s)r- roots, only one *(s)r- root, (*(s)reigh- 'klettern') is listed in Pokorny, as Peter points out, but even this appears questionable, since the Larousse Dic. of IE roots lists 'klettern' as continuing *gel-, like Eng. 'climb' (<*gle-m-bh-). All very confusing and unsystematic for the general linguist wanting to come to terms with PIE root structure. Pat wrote : >I suspect the key to this puzzle is that *s + *Herew -> *sreu-. Now this (if I have understood it) is an interesting idea, which I have suspected for some time for reasons I won't go into here. If we postulate a pre-PIE root *(s)Hxer- 'flow, move' (where Hx = undetermined laryngeal), then would not this account economically for *ser- (Hx drop-out from the s- prefixed form of the root), *sreu- (zero grade extension of the s- prefixed form of the root after Hx drop-out), and *rei- (zero grade of (?)*Hxer- after Hx drop-out)? Might it not also account for *er- 'move' (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov) after Hx drop-out from the s- less form? I suppose much would depend on the relative chronology. Sorry if the specifics are not perfect, but can any evidence be adduced to support or reject the idea? Again, many thanks for your thoughts. Dennis. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Oct 7 00:03:26 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:03:26 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I am interested in finding articles that have been written on either of these two items as well as more general articles dealing with the folklore and customs associated with either concept. In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most welcome. If you wish, you can reply to this request off the list. Thank you, Roz Frank _________________________________________________________ Roslyn M. Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 fax: (319)-335-2990 email: roz-frank at uiowa.edu Institute of Basque Studies Guildhall University, London. http://ibs.lgu.ac.uk/ _________________________________________________________ From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Oct 7 03:22:05 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 21:22:05 -0600 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00a701c02eda$78f14580$cc56073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, petegray wrote: > Why should the laryngeals line up with the allegedly three-fold velar > series? Why not with the much more widely attested three-fold stop series > (T, D, DH), whatever that was? Because of effects on vowel quality, or what some would call vowel place. We should note that there may well have been fewer perceptible effects than places. Velar and dental, and labial and labio-velar, might have had very similar effects. DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Oct 7 12:16:42 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2000 14:16:42 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens wrote: >On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, >> x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through >> Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even >> close. Why no labial? >If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or >most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call >it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY >close to Dutch. But not *that* close. In the north, we have /s/, /x/ and /h/, but no /G/. In the south, they have /z/, /s/, /G/, /x/ and /h/. Additionally, there's either /f/ or /v/ and /f/. [I'm not counting written as a fricative: it's a bilabial, labiodental or labialized labiodental approximant or stop, depending on dialect]. Interesting that you say "at least some (or most? or all?) of the time". I've been thinking along those lines myself. We distinguish the laryngeals by their vowel colouring and vocalic reflexes in Greek, mainly, but that doesn't mean that every laryngeal that gave /e/ in Greek must have come from the same unitary PIE laryngeal phoneme. In the case of *h1, I agree that some, or most of the time, we're dealing with /h/: (some) *h1('s) aspirate(s) a following or preceding stop, some *h1's give /h-/ in Armenian and Albanian. On the other hand, *h1 must sometimes have been a simple glottal stop /?/: I believe a root like *h1es- "to be" is more likely to have been /?es-/ than /hes-/ (I mean, maybe it was */hes-/, but I don't think it's likely that *all* roots beginning with *h1V- had /h/). As to *h3, I don't think /G/ is very likely. At least in late PIE, I think there were no voiced fricatives. Earlier voiced *z, as in the nom.sg. which lengthens the thematic vowel, later merged with *s, so it's very unlikely that *G, if it ever existed, did not merge with *x (*G is usually the first voiced fricative to go, cf. Dutch). Also, a voiced velar fricative does not explain the o-colouring, so we should at least have /Gw/, and that would be strange indeed, to have /Gw/ without /G/. My own proposal would be to split up *h3 into /xw/ (labialized *h2, aspirating, Hittite h-), /?w/ and /hw/ (labialized *h1, partially aspirating, Hittite 0-) [allowing Jens to withdraw his "vote for chaos"]. "Voicing" *h3 can then be from *Gw > *xw, if the traditional reconstruction of the stops holds, or from *?w if the glottalic theory is correct. A possible confirmation of either thesis might come if we could discover cases of voicing *h2 (< *G) or of voicing *h1 (< *?). Now if we have labialized laryngeals (*h3), we probably have palatalized ones too (*?y, *hy, *xy). The first two surely give *h1, the last one too (as phonetic [g]), judging by the *h3 ~ *h1 alternations in the dual endings, which I trace back to auslautend nominative *-(a)ku > *-xw > *-h3 and oblique *-(a)ki > *-xy > *-h1. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Sun Oct 8 09:05:32 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 11:05:32 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" To: Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 4:42 PM Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals > On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, x^w/ is, as a fricative >> series, bizarre. I looked through Hockett's Manual of Phonology and >> couldn't find anything even close. Why no labial? > If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or > most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call > it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY > close to Dutch. > Jens E. Rasmussen [Ed Selleslagh] I don't want to be facetious, but you should mention that you refer to the classic and historic pronunciation of Dutch, still in use in the Brabant (mostly acheless though) and Limburg (i.e. Frankish) dialect areas in Flanders and southern Netherlands, as well as in official Flemish Dutch on TV etc. Within this context, you are note close to, but right ON the mark. Matters are more complicated because in the provinces of the Netherlands north of the great rivers (Schelde, Maas, Rhine), including Amsterdam, pronunciation has shifted considerably: /s/ has become slightly 'chuintante', /h/ is intact, and /gh/ has become DEVOICED in most positions and a lot more guttural as is the new /x/ (originally ach-laut) which is often hard to distinguish from the new /gh/. This evolution is fairly recent (much less than a century), at least in 'official' speech. [Devoicing is also frequent in other consonants, and /r/ has become relatively close to the American one. On the other hand, voiceless consonants are voiced in certain positions: 'universiteit' is pronounced /uniferzite at t/; the rules are reminescent of High German]. Apart from that, I suppose you only meant to mention pronunciation facts, not origin since e.g. many (most) initial /h/ (like in all Germanic) stem from /k/, not H1. Ed. From menno.forconi at libero.it Sun Oct 8 12:25:33 2000 From: menno.forconi at libero.it (Menno Forconi) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 14:25:33 +0200 Subject: R: Pokorny's Dictionary Message-ID: Pokorny, Julius Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Band I: Text / Band II: Vorrede des Verfassers, Register, Abkürzungsverzeichnis Francke · 1994 · 3. Aufl. · ISBN 3-7720-0947-6 2 Bde., IV, 1183; IV, 465 Seiten, geb. DM 420,-/ÖS 3276,-/SFr 420,- www.geist.de/francke/verlag-D.html ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 12:07 PM >> Does anyone know how to get a copy of Pokorny's Dictionary? > Write or email directly to Francke Verlag, Tubingen (or Basel). You can use > your search engine to find their website on the internet. I think it's > about 420 DM. > Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Oct 8 15:57:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 10:57:44 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: besides *sreu- "to flow" Watkins 1985 gives *srebh- "to suck, absorb" < ? *sreu- in the sense of "to (make) flow in" ? and also superficially resembles Arabic sh-r-b- "to drink" *srenk- "to snore", root of words for "snore, snout, etc." onomatopoeic?; < ? *sreu- "that which produces a flow, flowing" ? *sri:g- "cold" e.g. Latin fri:gus related to *reig- "to stretch out, i.e. rigid" ? [snip] >This is just the point I'm making : IE dictionaries such as Pokorny and >Watkins list several *sC- roots (where C= stop or sonorant) which are ofter >related to *sVC- roots with similar or identical 'meanings', e.g. *skei- >'cut'/*sek- 'cut'. But no *(s)r- roots appear in Watkins, even though he >gives *sreu- 'flow, move' along with *rei- 'flow'. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Oct 7 02:03:05 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:03:05 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <00a501c02eda$774da7a0$cc56073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 03:09 PM 10/5/00 +0100, petegray wrote: >IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or > > >derivational? >> o-form as a noun or adjective, >> and an e-form as a verbal root >Might it not begin as, say, a result of phonetic environment, but in later >PIE be used for derivational purposes? This "grammaticalising" of an >originally phonetically conditioned variant is known elsewhere in various >languages. >So the fact that it is used derivationally does not prove it began that way. Of course not. The issue I am addressing is its status in PIE itself. Pre-PIE is a different issue. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Oct 8 15:49:03 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 16:49:03 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: [LT] >> Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, > Often also with -th-, despite the dictionaries. (I have never heard it > with -dh!) Very interesting. The word turns up so rarely that I simply don't know what pronunciation most people would use for it. But I had to read that Longfellow poem in high school, and I believe we were taught to pronounce 'smithy' with edh. But, for whatever reason, I've always pronounced it with edh, and I confess I didn't know that most of the world was using theta. Thanks for the correction. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:41:26 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:41:26 +0300 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 1 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Apr 2000 Stefan Georg wrote: [Pat Ryan] >>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". Sorry Stefan, but this sounds like a non sequitur to me. The fact that words (or elements) that have different "meanings" can't be used in the same context is a limitation on homophones, but doesn't really affect other words with different meanings. In the sense that meaning is being used here (that different phonemes give rise to different meanings), meaning and function are not equivalent. Meaning as you are using it here means "meaning class," not "meaning." Words that have the same function but different meanings can be used in the same context: Bill hit John with a stick. Bill hit John with a rope. Bill hit John with a brick. It is homonyms that cannot have the same function or be used in the same context (you can't use quail [n.; a bird] and quail [v. 'to fall back', 'to give way'] in the same context, but that doesn't prove that they have different phonemes). In fact, even homonyms with the same function can have different meanings so long as each meaning requires a different context (or you are willing to put up with a lot of ambiguity). Consider the following: Suzie runs five miles every morning. Suzie runs the office. Suzie runs for Mayor every year. Suzie runs off to Boston every weekend. Suzie's car runs well. Suzie's mascara runs when she cries. Suzie's toilet runs unless she jiggles the handle. Suzie's tongue runs away with her when she has a couple of drinks. In each of these uses of the verb 'run' the context compels the selection of a distinctly different meaning. The fact that these elements have different meanings does not prove that they have different phonemes. It is not true that words that have different meanings must have different phonemes. Phonemes can cause differences in meaning, but differences in meaning don't cause phonemes. If they did then homonyms would have to have invisible (inaudible?) phonemes that account for the differences in meaning. Phonemes are not units of meaning. Phonemes are semantically empty. If a phoneme is not semantically empty, then it isn't (just) a phoneme any more; it's a morpheme. And different phonemes do not necessarily create a difference in function. For example: John ate a fig. John ate a pig. Now there is no doubt that /f/ and /p/ are different phonemes in English but these two words have the same function and can be used in the same context (or "frame" if you like) although they have different "meanings" (in the senses that we are talking about). So it is rather the other way around. Words with different functions can have the same phonemes (hence we have homonyms). It is words with the same function but different meanings that can't have the same phonemes (otherwise you have ambiguity). English has ways of distinguishing in writing words that have come to have the same the same phonemes, but not in speech. This is what makes English such a marvelous punning language. Take for example the phonemically identical 'night' and 'knight' which have the same function (noun). This makes controlled ambiguity (double entendre) possible ("once a king, always a king, but once a knight is enough"). So the fact that 'sooth' and 'soothe' have different functions (and even different meanings) does not prove anything about whether [dh] is a phoneme in English or not since words with different meanings and functions can have the same phonemes ('quail [n.]' and 'quail' [v.]) and words with the same function can have different phonemes ('fig', 'pig') or the same phonemes ('knight', 'night'). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:46:47 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:46:47 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Apr 2000 Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[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. And you really must distinguish between productive rules and other rules. "The" productive rule is the one that is used to create new forms in the language. It is the default rule when a form is not marked for some other rule. Other rules are exceptions to the productive rule. These are markedness rules because forms that follow them have to be marked in the lexicon. Speakers of a language learn the markedness rules when they learn the language. There must be synchronic rules that produce these forms or else they wouldn't exist. The synchronic rules aren't the same as the diachronic rules that originally produced the forms, but they have the same result. They have to, because the basis of both historical grammar and synchronic grammar is the same: the language as it is presently spoken. But modern speakers don't know that this is an umlaut rule (most modern speakers don't even know what umlaut is); they just know it as a rule that six words in the lexicon are marked for. If they didn't know the rule, the plural of 'foot' would be 'foots' and the plural of 'tooth' would be 'tooths'. Linguists tend to use "productive" in two senses with respect to rules. "The" productive rule is the default rule that is used to produce new forms in the language. "A" productive rule is one that the speakers of the language know and use to generate some forms. So a rule may not be "the" productive rule but may still be "a" productive rule in the sense that speakers use it to produce forms currently used in the language. A non-productive rule is one that is no longer used at all in the language. An example of a non-productive rule in English is the use of '-(e)st' to form second person singular verb forms. There are no second person verb forms in '-(e)st' (like 'goest' or 'didst') in modern English because this rule is now non-productive. There are, however, noun/verb pairs like grass/graze, house/house, half/halve/, breath/breathe, bath/bathe, etc. This indicates that there is a productive morphophonemic rule that generates these forms. If there were no productive rule that creates these forms, then the forms wouldn't exist synchronically. The verb would be the same as the noun following "the" productive rule. If you are trying to tell me that rules that aren't "the" productive rule aren't known by native speakers then you are trying to tell me that there aren't any strong verbs in English because the rules that produced them are no longer productive, I just don't believe it. You may go around saying things like "I seed it with my own eyes" or "I have always thinked so," but most of the native speakers I know do not. If you think that synchronic grammar consists of only "the" productive rules, then you have a very idiosyncratic view of synchronic grammar. Synchronic grammar consists of both "the" productive (default) rules and other productive (markedness) rules. The markedness rules generate exceptions to "the" productive rules. >Therefore they are NOT synchronic morphophonemic variants. Sure they are. Any time you have a systematic phonological change that results in a systematic morphological change you have morphophonemic variation. The fact that modern speakers don't know that it is a morphophonemic change doesn't alter the linguistic fact. Again, most modern speakers don't know what morphophonemics is. There are two basic types of morphophonemic alternation. One occurs when a single morpheme has different phonological shapes depending on its environment. An example is the English plural morpheme '-(e)s' which is either voiced or voiceless depending on its phonological environment. Another example is the variation of the determiner 'a/an' depending on its phonetic environement. The other type of morphophonemic variation occurs when a regular phonological change causes a regular morphological change. Such changes often result in a change in grammatical meaning but not in lexical meaning or move the word from one functional category to another without significantly changing its underlying meaning. You have this exactly backwards. They *are* synchronic morphophonemic variants. They are not archaic morphophonemic variants. The process that created them was not morphophonemic in nature. It was a simple phonological change. It was triggered by a phonological environment that had no regard for meaning. But the synchronic rule that maintains these forms in the language is morphophonemic because the environment that triggers these changes is now morphological rather than phonological. Phonemes are units of sound. Morphemes are units of meaning. When a specific and predictable change in a sound causes a specific and predictable change in meaning, or when a morpheme has more than one phonetic realization on a predictable basis, then you have morphophonemics. >[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. Yes, this last statement is true (even if the first one isn't :>). It is a matter of timing. Since vowels are voiced, making a voiceless consonant sound following a vowel involves turning voicing off *before* beginning the consonant sound, creating a clear boundary between the vowel and the unvoiced consonant. Voiced sounds do not turn off voicing so there is no clear boundary between the vowel and the consonant. As a result the vowel sounds longer (and can be measured to be longer) because it continues into the beginning of the consonant. But I wouldn't call this lengthening (at least, not with respect to English), I would call it prolongation (a trivial-seeming point, but it avoids misunderstandings). >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. No, I can see that you aren't now; it was your use of "lengthening" that misled me. But you are the one who seems to be having problems separating out the diachronic and synchronic processes that produce these forms. I do not believe that the processes that originally produced these forms are still operating in modern English. The original creation of these forms was not morphophonemic. It was a simple sound change. English once had no voiced spirants. It had only unvoiced /th/, /f/, and /s/ (Proto-Germanic *z merged with *r in pre-English). Then a phonetic change took place that can be expressed by the rule [unvoiced spirant] > [voiced spirant] / [voice]___[voice]. There are other factors that may affect the change, such as the location of the stress, but note that this change is entirely phonological: the conditioning environment is phonetic and it affects all sounds in that environment regardless of meaning. This change caused the voicing of spirants in plural forms and verbal infinitives, not because of meaning, but because these forms, as they were at the time of the change, provided the required environment for the change to take place. This change did not create any new contrasts (phonemes). All it did was create voiced allophones of the original phonemes: /th/ [th, dh], /f/ [f, v], /s/ [s, z]. The forms of the plural and the infinitive also provided environments for a number of other changes (rules) to take place (although not at the same time) such as partial assimlation of vowels (umlaut) and lengthening of short vowels in open syllables. All in all, quite a number of rules pile up on these forms. Then other rules cause the forms to change, eliminating the conditioning environment that brought about these changes. However, the unvoiced/voiced distinction in spirants was kept in plurals (now formed with '-s') and noun/verb pairs. The new rule looks like this: [final unvoiced spirant] --> [voiced spirant] / [PLURAL, VERB]. Note that the phonetic environment has been replaced with a grammatical one. The change is no longer predictable phonologically. But it is still predictable. It is only when the change is used outside this enviroment that it is no longer predictable (in view of one of your previous posts, note that [POSSESSIVE] is not part of the environment; thus the distinction of paths/path's is not phonemic [phonetic, yes; phonemic, no] since the [dhz] of 'paths' is predictable by rule as is the [ths] of 'path's'). But the modern synchronic rule (as stated above) is morphophonemic and, of course, it is not "the" productive rule. The productive rule is NOUN --> VERB / ... (meaning that any noun can be used as a verb). But if you believe that the modern language doesn't have a rule that makes 'teethe' the verb from 'tooth', just start asking people if their baby is toothing and see what kind of reactions you get. Or if you believe that there is no modern rule that makes 'thieves' and 'halves' the plural of 'thief' and 'half', then you can use plurals like 'thiefs' and 'halfs'. People will probably understand you, because you are using "the" productive rule, but they will also probably wonder what your native language is. >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. Yes I agree that the /i:/ of 'teethe' can be expected to be more protracted than that of 'teeth' because of the voicing of the final consonant. But in my view, it is protracted even beyond what one would expect based on similar pairs (like 'safe', 'save' or 'staple', 'stable') leading me to believe that there is additional stress on the form. One notes a similarity in words such as 'writer' /rait at r/ and 'rider' /rai:d at r/ (where : implies additional vowel quantity). In dialects where /t/ and /d/ have merged into a dental flap, this additional vowel quantity is now the phonemic difference (/raiFLAP at r/, /rai:FLAP at r/). Since this kind of distinction is not normally phonemic in English, there may have been a rephonemicization ([shortness]+FLAP ~ /*t/ and [longness]+FLAP ~ /*d/). [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". Golly, one word is "way too many." :) But here is the tricky bit about 'ether': This word was already in Middle English (first attested in the 14th century according to my dictionary). This is before any possiblity of a phoneme split between [th] and [dh]. At this stage, [th] and [dh] were clearly still allophones because the original conditioning environment that caused the sound change had not yet fully disappeared. In this situation, 'ether', with its intervocalic [th] would have stuck out a mile as a foreign word. And 'either' didn't get its present phonological shape until after the Great Vowel Shift, so there was no need to distinguish 'ether' from 'either' originally. Even after the Great Vowel Shift, [th] and [dh] were still not phonemically distinct so there is no way to claim that 'ether' and 'either' were originally differentiated by different phonemes. So you are trying to tell me that when [th] and [dh] allegedly split into two phonemes, the difference between 'ether' and 'either' suddenly became a phonemic distinction. My question then is, how were they distinguished during the centuries before this split took place? My answer would be that /th/ had two allophones, [th] and [dh]; intervocalically the rule was that /th/ was realized as [dh] in native words and as [th] in non-native words that had [th] in this position. Since this rule still operates today, it is hard to see how the sole example where its operation creates a minimal distinction can be considered as evidence of the phonemicity of the segements involved. >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'? You are quite correct that "nativization" is in the perception of the speakers. But all the words you list were already present in Old English (and I'm not so sure about 'seal' [the animal], 'herring', and 'sea' being loans; you'd do better with 'egg', 'cup', and 'rose'), and as you say, have been completely Anglicized. And there is not an intervocalic [th] in the lot. To check on perceptions of "borrowed" vs. "native", let's look at three borrowings of the same root from the Latin-French continuum. If we consider 'cant', 'chant', and 'chanson' we will see that these three words came into English at various stages of Latin-French phonological development as indicated by the pronunciation of the initial consonant. 'Cant' and 'chant' are fully Anglicized and probably would not be recognized as loans by naive native speakers. But 'chanson' has been in the language for about 400 years and it still has its French pronunciation. It simply resists Anglicization because it is not known to most naive native speakers. People who know this word are likely to know that it has a French pronunciation and to know why. >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. This latter process is what Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396, calls "nativization by adoption" which he characterizes as "downright adoption of the foreign segment or ... adoption of the segment in a context in which it does not occur natively." Let me quote what he has to say in summary on pp. 396-97: The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively different from the other nativization processes: It does not really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into the language without losing track of the fact that they are and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. Hock goes on to point out that the second thing that the Old Irish example shows is that once a word is accepted as native, then it is treated exactly like a native word. Now while a thousand years is surely enough time for nativization to take place, most of the words that I am talking about have been in English far less than that. Surviving words that were already in OE are surely considered native. Even words like 'sky' and 'skirt' are doubtless considered native despite the fact that the initial [sk] tells a linguist that they are loans from Old Norse and despite the fact that 'skirt' has a native doublet, 'shirt'. >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. The same is of course true of '-ize' and '-ism', but despite the fact that they are fully productive suffixes in English, most speakers probably still perceive them as foreign. In its borrowings, English is omnivorous. It will use foreign suffixes with native stems and foreign stems with native suffixes, perhaps knowing that they are foreign, but not really caring. All in all, the likelihood that borrowed words will be considered native depends on a number of factors, which include (but are not necessarily limited to): 1) The length of time that the word has been in the language: words that were borrowed already in OE like 'cup', 'rose', 'street' are likely to be considered native because they have undergone most of the same phonetic changes that native words have. 2) How well the words resemble native words: words like 'candle' or 'castle' are likely to be considered native because of their resemblance to native words like 'handle' or 'wrestle'. On the other hand, words like 'chandelier' or 'château', which were borrowed from the same roots but at a much later date, are almost certain to be considered foreign because of their un-English phonology and morphology. Likewise, 'chief' is likely to be considered native because of its resemblance to native 'thief', while 'chef', borrowed from the same root but about 500 years later will probably be considered foreign. Similarly, 'file' (a collection of papers) is likely to be considered native because it is homonymous with the native 'file' (the tool). No connection is likely to be seen between the borrowed 'file' and 'filament', which may or may not be considered a loan. 'Arms' (weapons) and 'army' are likely to be considered native because of their similarity to the native 'arm', while the native word for "army," 'here', has disappeared from the language with only a few traces. Indeed, were the good (Old) English word 'heretoga', "war leader," to be revived, most people would doubtless consider it foreign (unless they recognize it through the German cognate 'Herzog'). 3) Short words (particularly those that match English phonotactics) are more likely to be considered native than long words. Thus 'air' or 'sky' is likely to be considered native, while 'atmosphere' would doubtless be considered foreign. 4) In general, words borrowed from languages that are closely cognate with English (such as other Germanic languages) are more likely to be considered native than words borrowed from more distantly related or unrelated languages. Thus 'egg', 'fir', and 'skin' are likely to be considered native while 'khaki', 'pajamas/pyjamas', and 'etiolate' are likely to be considered foreign. 5) Common, frequently used words are more likely to be considered native than rare words (however valid or false this perception may be). 6) Words that flat out violate English phonotactics in a fairly spectacular fashion, like 'aardvark', 'zygote', 'syzygy', or 'quincunx' are likely to always be considered foreign (or at least non-native) no matter how long they stay in the language. Loans with intervocalic [th] may very well belong to this category (although this is not a particularly spectacular violation). >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. It's hardly an artificial distinction. The distinction is disgustingly regular. And the vast majority of these words are not "ancient" borrowings but occurred after the change took place. Words that were in the language before the change took place (like 'rose') underwent the change. >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, For the (next to) last time, John, the change that created these forms was not morphophonemic. There is a productive modern English rule that creates these forms for modern speakers or else the forms wouldn't be there. The synchronic rule is not the same one that created the forms. >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. Sure they have split, possibly even into two phonemes. There is no reason why [th] and [dh] shouldn't or couldn't be separate phonemes in English. They just aren't used as separate phonemes; that is as markers of *arbitrary* distinctions in meaning. Show me an example where the difference can't be accounted for by a fully generalized rule and I'll believe it. But you are also forgetting about the evidence of loan words from languages that do have a /dh/ phoneme where this phoneme doesn't get taken into English as [dh] (e.g., 'dhow' [from Arabic] or 'dharma' [from Hindi]). If [dh] is really a phoneme in English, then there is no reason why these words shouldn't come into English with that phoneme. After all, foreign words with [v] or [z] come into English with /v/ or /z/. So why shouldn't foreign words with [dh] come into English with /*dh/? >[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. Perhaps, but it looks like the trap was dug by the Numicists themselves rather than being there in the language. >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. >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). There is a similar phenomenon in Finnish, known as gemination (sometimes referred to as the "phantom consonant"). Certain forms of certain types of verbs and certain forms of certain types of nouns trigger gemination of the initial consonant of the following word (e.g., "come here" is realized as 'tulet tänne'). This event is both phonologically (always comes after [e]) and morphologically (only certain forms that meet the phonological criterion trigger it) conditioned. It usually doesn't get a very detailed or coherent discussion in grammars, but I have never seen anyone try to explain it by a stem-final silent phoneme. Perhaps Ante Aikio can help me out on this one. >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]. Yes, I agree. >(Now's the part where we disagree.) Again, I agree. >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. I can't see why. These are simply morphophonemic alternations. Such alternations with different stem types are normally treated as variant declensions based on noun classes. If you want to call these variants morphophonemes, but not phonemes, I would have no objection. >Because of the completely non-productive nature of the old >morphophonemic processes which gave rise to [th] versus [dh], For the last time, John, the processes that gave rise to [th] and [dh] were not morphophonemic. It is the modern synchronic rules that are morphophonemic. And they are productive because if they weren't, the forms wouldn't be in the language. >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. We can set them up, but we can't get speakers to use them. Until speakers use them as phonemes we can't say that they exist as phonemes. The potential for their use as phonemes exists, and they are probably on the verge of being used as phonemes (for example, 'bath' has both forms of the plural [baths] and [badhz]; if these two forms come to have distinct meanings {such as [badhz] denoting an immersion in water ('the children have all had their baths[dhz]') and [baths] referring to a place where one can be immersed in water ('we visited the baths[ths] of Caracalla yesterday')}) then this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as these forms remain in free variation, there is no phonemic distinction. >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'm sorry, John. I didn't mean to get your goat, and now that I have it I don't know what to do with it. But since your perception of what I said (as indicated by your paraphrase) and what I actually said ("Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair") have little relation to one another, I don't consider that it is my fault. I see a vast difference between "No one doubts ..." and "Most people would not insist on ...". So you can have your goat back with my compliments. But if you contintue to react to your perceptions of what is said rather than what is actually said, then I predict that your goat will continue to go walkabout with disturbing regularity. I suggest that you keep it on a shorter tether. :) >I doubt it, and quite seriously. I doubt it, too. I just want to see some evidence that makes it unequivocal. Everything that I have found that *could* be taken as evidence for [th] and [dh] being used as separate phonemes can be convincingly explained otherwise. I think it is something that is in the process of happening and therefore hard to pin down. It is rather like the change in the meaning of 'fulsome' that is currently taking place. While both meanings are in use, there is the danger of ambiguity. >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. :) Hear, hear. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:53:43 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:53:43 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: [Ross Clark] >>> 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. First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second point, I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how language works linguistically (some areas are easier than others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say what goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it would certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we can get at is the language that speakers produce. Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely to get there. >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? Let me answer this from back to front. You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it produces a nice phonological generalization. This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. What more can one ask of a theory (or hypothesis or law) than that it account for the observed data in a consistent and concise manner and that it provide a reliable generalization? Nothing, really, except, of course, that it have a test for falsification. But you can't say that things that native speakers are unaware of can't affect phonology or phonemic analysis. Most native speakers are unaware in any conscious way of what phonemes are. They may use them in every utterance they make, but they can't tell you what they are (actually, linguists have a pretty hard time telling you what they are :>). If you ask a native speaker what the phonemes of his language are, he won't be able to tell you. Determination of phonemes can only be done by recording unselfconscious speech and seeing, from linguistic analysis, what the phonemes are. And different analysts may arrive at different phonemic analyses. So whether native speakers are aware of the reasons for the way they use their language or not is irrelevant to its analysis. As for what evidence I have that native speakers are able to keep track of foreign words (although not necessarily specifically as "foreign" words), I have already quoted Hock 1986 elsewhere, but for the sake of overkill, I will quote it here again: The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively different from the other nativization processes: It does not really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into the language without losing track of the fact that they are and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396-97 This is only one person's opinion, but I don't doubt that similar statements could be found in other textbooks of historical linguistics, so I will consider it as evidence that native speakers can recognize foreign words, if they have not been phonologically nativized, for a considerable time after they have entered the language, by their phonological peculiarities. If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized pronunciation of 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after it entered the language (first attested in 1601 according to my dictionary). But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the words as native or non-native. For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in English words. But first it is necessary to show that a pattern actually exists. If there is no pattern, which the theory relies on, then the theory is falsified. While the fact that the six typical English words that you offered as examples (pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur) are indeed all loan words is suggestive, it is not really sufficient. To see if there is a pattern, I have taken a lemmatized list of English words based on the British National Corpus (BNC) available on the web at http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html This list contains 6318 lemmata whose tokens have more than 800 occurrences in the BNC of over 6 million words. From this I have extracted lemmata with intervocalic . These were then marked as words that can reasonably be considered native (already in OE, [+n]) and as words that are non-native (came into the language in ME or later [-n]). I then determined the pronunciation of the segment ([th] or [dh]) using my dictionary. The data are arranged as follows: 1. rank of frequency (based on 2.) 2. total number of tokens of the lemma in the corpus 3. lemma 4. function 5. native/non-native 6. pronunciation of segment 7. any additional information 2558 3218 altogether adv [+n] [dh] 159 60182 another det [+n] [dh] 347 28321 anything pron [+n] [th] [+compound] 1413 6852 author n [-n] [th] 5647 968 authorise v [-n] [th] 303 31231 authority n [-n] [th] 2188 4048 bother v [??] [dh] 864 11757 brother n [+n] [dh] 3412 2072 cathedral n [-n] [th] 3630 1892 clothing n [+n] [dh] 656 15599 either adv [+n] [dh] 840 12167 either det [+n] [dh] 5143 1134 ethical a [-n] [th] 6050 857 ethics n [-n] [th] 436 23216 father n [+n] [dh] 5302 1075 feather n [+n] [dh] 1859 4986 gather v [+n] [dh] 5096 1149 gathering n [+n] [dh] 5008 1184 gothic a [-n] [th] 4135 1568 hitherto adv [+n] [dh] 3230 2264 hypothesis n [-n] [th] 2939 2625 leather n [+n] [dh] 6128 841 marathon n [-n] [th] 4823 1248 mathematical a [-n] [th] 3517 1969 mathematics n [-n] [th] 575 18044 method n [-n] [th] 5396 1041 methodology n [-n] [th] 354 27784 mother n [+n] [dh] 1798 5227 neither adv [+n] [dh] 2687 3018 neither det [+n] [dh] 277 34064 nothing pron [+n] [th] [+compound] 75 135185 other a [+n] [dh] 264 35164 other n [+n] [dh] 685 14959 other pron [+n] [dh] 1150 8798 otherwise adv [+n] [dh] 219 42341 rather adv [+n] [dh] 1988 4553 southern a [+n] [dh] 4330 1473 sympathetic a [-n] [th] 3113 2377 sympathy n [-n] [th] 309 30960 together adv [+n] [dh] 1623 5873 weather n [+n] [dh] 260 36169 whether conj [+n] [dh] 4875 1232 within adv [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] 207 45042 within prep [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] 204 45867 without prep [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] The list contains only 45 words and many of these are phonologically identical with functional differences or are derivations from the same root. The pattern presented by these 45 words, however, is overwhelmingly consistent. Of the native words, five have a [th] pronunciation, and these are all transparent compounds where the occurs at a morpheme boundary (moreover, three of these five can have either pronunciation); the rest have the [dh] pronunciation. Of the non-native words, *all* have the [th] pronunciation. As far as I can see, there are no close calls on native vs. non-native. The only word whose origin is questionable is 'bother'. One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 lemmata with intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native (and 5 of these are clearly derivative). You say that there are hundreds of these words in the language (and so there are, if not thousands). This makes one point quite clear. While there may be quite a large number of loan words in English, the core vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences in a corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you eliminate derivatives) of these lemmata. This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the lemmata with intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. The larger one's vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as an absolute, but as a percentage of the total) one is likely to know. Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level. Hence by the time that one has acquired a large number of such lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated to realize that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor often consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. Thus my test of the pronunciation of these words may not be entirely accurate, since I am relying on my own pronunciation and on the pronunciation given by the dictionary. As a turnabout, if you have evidence that native speakers regularly mispronounce these words because they don't know that they are loans, that would be germane. The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must be created by its speakers because that is the only place that language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then it is simple coincidence. If it can be shown that the pattern created by intervocalic [th] in loan words and intervocalic [dh] in native words is below the level of coincidence then the theory is falsified. Even without applying any statistical tests to the pattern, I think coincidence can be ruled out. Now if there were no pattern, then intervocalic [th] and [dh] should appear scattered through the lexicon in a random fashion. As a percentage of the total, the number of [th]'s and [dh]'s should be about the same in both loans and native words. In this case, [th] and [dh] would be phonemically distinct because there would be no way to predict which one would occur in a voiced environment. However, the fact that *all* the loans have [th] suggests that this is not coincidence. As more and more examples of intervocalic [th] in English are investigated, I believe that the pattern will become overwhelmingly clear, far beyond the limits of coincidence. Intervocalic [th] will appear regularly in loan words, principally classical neologisms or borrowings from French; intervocalic [dh] will appear in native words. There will be intervocalic [th] in some native words, but these will form patterns of their own, occurring in words where the sound change rule did not operate or where [th] has been restored through analogy. There will also be a significant number of native words where either [th] or [dh] can appear as free variants. Thus far, I think I have shown that there is a pattern of intervocalic [th] in non-native words and intervocalic [dh] in native words, and that this pattern is not likely to be the result of coincidence. You said above that 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, ... You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact that words in English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly loan words because the speakers of the language are unaware that these are loans. As I mentioned above, this is not just a weak argument, it is a spurious one. It may be true that most speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is irrelevant to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then most linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic mechanisms of their language. What native speakers know is how to use their language, not how it works. Now it is quite possible to be able to use a system without knowing in detail how that system works. Think about it the next time you switch on your computer or your TV set or get in your car and drive off. With all these systems you may know what actions on your part cause the system to do certain things, but chances are that you don't know why the system reacts that way or how it accomplishes that reaction. So it is with native speakers of a language. The fact that naive native speakers know how to use their language but don't know how it works has two natural side-effects: (1) Naive native speakers are not a reliable source of grammatical information about their language. If asked if something is grammatically correct (acceptable usage), they will be able to say "yes" or "no" or "it depends"; but if asked why something is or is not grammatically correct, the response is likely to be "I don't know, it just is." (2) It is possible for a foreigner who has studied the language linguistically to know more about how the language works than a naive native speaker does, while still not being able to speak the language like a native speaker. What is important about all this is to keep in mind that it is possible to use some system even if one does not know in detail how it works, and that it is possible to know how a system works without being able to use it. It is even possible to talk about how a system works if the casual user of the system doesn't know what you are talking about. Admittedly, cars and TVs and computers are different from language. The former are designed by human beings who know exactly how they work. They are designed to be used by people who don't know how they work. Often the people who design them don't even want the user to know how they work. With language, nobody really knows how it works. Users can use it and linguists have studied many aspects of it to find out how it works, but basically, linguists don't generally try to tell users how language works. They (the linguists) are too busy studying yet more aspects of language in yet more detail and trying to reach agreement on how it works. And the users, for the most part, don't care how language works. Grammar (in the sense of prescriptive rules) is something that they have to study in school. When they don't have to study it, they forget it quickly. I think the attitude to grammar of most native speakers can be summed up by paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from _The Magnificent Seven_: "Grammar? -- We don't need no steenking grammar!" If speakers of a language really, passionately, want to know how their language works, then they become linguists. You are trying to maintain that it is not possible to discuss language in linguistic terms if naive native speakers do not realize that the linguistic terms exist or what they mean. More simply you maintain that linguistic descriptions of the functioning of a language cannot be based on distinctions that naive native speakers are unaware of. As a reductio ad absurdum, this would mean that 'feet' cannot possibly be the plural of 'foot' because the naive native speaker does not know what umlaut is. The different vowels in 'foot' and 'feet' cannot be morphophonemic alternation because the naive native speaker does not know what morphophonemics is. The different pronunciation of intervocalic [th] and [dh] cannot be attributed to a difference between foreign and native words because naive native speakers do not know the difference between foreign words and native words (truly naive native speakers do not even know that there are foreign words or, indeed, that there are other languages than their own). So there is a synchronic rule in English that makes 'feet' the plural of 'foot'. There has to be such a rule because otherwise the plural of 'foot' would be 'foots'. The fact that the native speaker is unaware of the historical reason for this rule is irrelevant. How, then, is it possible for linguists to know more about how language works than native speakers do? The answer is, of course, that linguists make it their business to know how language works. They study various languages to find out what is common to them in an effort to discover how language works. Native speakers do not know (and most of the time, they don't care) how language works; they only know how to use a language (note the distinction between "language" and "a language") and they can't explain how they know this. Knowing how to use a system is not the same thing as knowing how the system works. Part of the answer lies in the fact that linguists and native speakers come about their knowledge of language in different ways. Native speakers learn their language from hearing it and then imitating it, guessing at new forms by deduction, induction, and abduction. In doing so, they make a lot of mistakes. Often these mistakes are corrected at the time they are made, but sometimes they are self-corrected after further analysis or better imitation (and sometimes they are never corrected; this results in change [or at least variation] in the language). Children will often say 'foots' for 'feet'; when corrected, they will then often use 'feets' instead of 'feet' because, although they now know that the correct plural form is 'feet', they still want to apply the productive rule which adds /s/ to form the plural. So children learn the synchronic rules of grammar by trial and error. They don't learn rules like [+foreign] or [-native] (in fact, features like these are probably no longer used by linguists either, but are relics from my time in grad school; this doesn't really matter either, since, even though the terminology may have changed, the results will be the same). When faced with words like 'mother' and 'mathematics' they don't learn them as [+native] and [-native]; rather they learn them as [+voicing rule] and [-voicing rule]. In the normal way of things children don't learn the reasons for the rules or the reasons why the rules don't apply in some cases. They only learn them as [+rule] and [-rule] or sometimes as [+rule1] / environment1 and [+rule2] / environment2. It remains for a linguist to look at all the examples of [-voicing rule] and determine that the voicing rule operated at some time in the past and that any word that came into the language after this is not subject to it. Native speakers never learn this (unless they are really good at pattern recognition) and simply know that the voicing rule applies to some words and not to others. So even though the native speaker may not know that the reason for the rule that prevents voicing is based (for the most part) on [-native], he will still know that there is some rule that operates. He may refer to these words as "fancy words" or as "high-falutin' words" or as "book-learnin' words" but he will have some way of categorizing them. Furthermore, he will contrast them with "plain words" or "everyday words" or "words of one or two syllables" in a way that will remarkably parallel the linguistic idea of [+native] and [-native] (it won't match it exactly, because many loans, particularly short ones that match native English phonology will not be considered "fancy words"). We have already noted that there are a remarkable number of loan words in English, but that the core vocabulary, the most frequently used everyday words, remains Germanic. People who do not recognize Greek and Latin neologisms for what they are are not likely to have many of them in their vocabulary. Most of these words will fall into categories that such speakers will have little use for. Note also that mono- or bisyllabic loans from other Germanic or even Romance languages are much less likely to be recognized as loan words than polysyllabic words from Romance or Greek. Most speakers would not recognize 'sky' or 'air' as loan words (or consider them "fancy" words), whereas I feel confident that most speakers would recognize 'atmosphere' as a loan (neologism) word (or consider it a "fancy" word). Most native speakers would never doubt that 'curse' is a native (or a "plain") word, whereas 'anathema', if it is in the speaker's vocabulary, would surely be considered foreign (or "fancy"). And one reason that speakers will have for considering a word a "fancy" word is that it doesn't follow the same phonological rules that "plain" words do. I simply maintain that native speakers will make some kind of distinction between words like 'air' and 'atmosphere' or between 'curse' and 'anathema'. Of course this is getting dangerously close to looking like a circular argument: Speakers know that words belong to this category because they are pronounced differently and the words are pronounced differently because they belong to this category. But is not so circular as it may seem. At first the speaker may not know why (or even *that*) the words are pronounced differently. But as he collects more and more of them, they will eventually form a category (whatever he may call it) in his mind and he will know that any word that has this pronunciation anomaly is likely to belong to this category and that any word that he considers should belong to this category is likely to have the pronunciation anomaly. Rather than being circular, this is known as positive feedback. And in the long run, the words are not pronounced differently because they belong to this category; the rules for pronouncing these words are marked in the dictionary. It just turns out on analysis that words that are pronounced this way are overwhelmingly likely to belong to this category. Linguists know that there is likely to be a difference in the phonology of native words and foreign words. In fact many languages have a layer of phonology devoted to loan words. Linguists know this because they have checked this cross-linguistically. Native speakers don't usually get a chance to do this. For example, in recent borrowings in Finnish (within the past 200 years or so) consonant gradation does not take place (please don't ask me to explain consonant gradation :>). Thus 'automobile', 'of an automobile' (compare 'street' 'of a street') or 'mug', 'of a mug' (compare 'hill' 'of a hill'). Children learning the language, however, are unaware that these are loanwords, and unless or until they are corrected will use 'audon'. Once corrected, they will use 'auton' and the word will be marked [-consonant gradation]. Chances are that the speaker will never know why it is marked [-rule]. It is sufficient for his purposes that it is so marked. Some day a linguist may tell him that it is [-rule] because it is [-native] (or with enough education or experience he may figure it out for himself), but it won't make any difference to the way he uses the language. He doesn't need to know the reason for the rule, he just needs to know the rule. It just makes it easier for him if he can apply the rule to a category of words rather to each word individually. Once he finds out that one of these words that follow this rule is a recent loan, he is likely to consider that they all are. And so eventually he may generalize the rule so that any word that is perceived as a recent loan will be without consonant gradation and any word without consonant gradation will be considered a recent loan. So the pattern exists; its regularity makes it extremely unlikely to be coincidence. The pattern can be easily accounted for on historical grounds. The fact that synchronic grammar is unable to account for the pattern is not grounds for saying that the pattern does not exist or for saying that the pattern is not significant. Rather, it points to a deficiency in synchronic grammar, a blind spot where the rules that speakers use to create this pattern cannot be reconstructed. But synchronically the pattern must be generated by the speakers of the language; otherwise, it wouldn't be there. It can't be a phonemic distinction because it is predictable. To get to the heart of the matter, the real crux here is the difference between diachronic (historical) grammar and synchronic (descriptive) grammar. At various times it has been claimed that synchronic grammar liberates languages and linguistics from its historical shackles, that it makes historical linguistics obsolete, that it severs the connection between a language's history and the way it is used. But as time wears on, it has become obvious that there is really not all that much difference between synchronic grammar and historical linguistics. And especially that there is virtually no difference in the results of the two methods. When one stops to think about it, there can't be much difference between the results, because the results are the same: the modern language as it is presently spoken. In one case, the language is the result of the historical processes that produced it. In the other, it is the result of the processes that its native speakers use to produce it. But it is still the same language. So historical grammar and synchronic grammar simply focus on two different aspects of the same thing. And this should be a clue that they are in many ways complementary. Historical rules often make it easier (or even possible) to understand synchronic rules. But synchronic rules have to operate without reference to historical rules because the speakers of a language are, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the history of the grammar that they use. But synchronic rules and historical rules have to have the same result (even though, for practical reasons, one may be expressed in opposite terms from the other or many historical rules may be compressed into a single synchronic rule) because they both describe the same language. Furthermore, there are those, like Hjelmslev, who maintain that internal reconstruction using a single language can never be historical, because anything that can be extracted about the language in this way must be in the language synchronically. Therefore, if there are morphophonemic alternations in the language, there must be synchronic rules that produce them or else they wouldn't be there. Using features like [-native] to block certain rules is doubtless out of vogue as a synchronic reconstruction since it can be argued that native speakers can't tell the difference between native words and foreign words (and I would agree, in principle, that the average native speaker would be unaware of this distinction when stated this way), but there must be some feature that acts to block the voicing rules synchronically or else the unvoiced spirants wouldn't be there in such a predictable pattern. But I can't see that inventing dummy phonemes that block the operation of rules is an improvement. And I find it hard to say that the difference between intervocalic [th] and intervocalic [dh] is a phonemic distinction when all Greek and Latin loanwords or neologisms with intervocalic [th] have [th] in English and the only contrast that can be pointed out is between [i:th at r] (a Greek loanword) and [i:dh at r] (a native word). The pronunciation of [th] in 'ether' is required by rule (as indicated by an overwhelming pattern of occurrences even if the rule can't be formulated synchronically) and the pronunciation of [dh] in 'either' is required by rule (ditto). If the sounds that occur in these words is predictable by rule, then the distinction isn't phonemic. So the question becomes: Just how much *do* speakers know about their language? This is a question that is somehow tied up with that of how cognition and language processing work, and, to my knowledge, it doesn't have an answer as of now. But it should not be argued that linguistic descriptions of linguistic phenomena are invalid because native speakers are unaware of them. Historical grammar and synchronic grammar must have the same result because they both describe the same language. In this way, they are rather like the wave models and particle models in particle physics. While the bases of these models may be contradictory, they must ultimately be complementary because they both accurately describe different aspects of the same physical reality. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:59:10 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:59:10 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 04 Oct 2000 Larry Trask wrote: >Max Wheeler writes: >[on non-verbs in final edh] >> Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? >> These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. >Not all of these work for me, but most of them do, and I can add >the noun 'edh' (or 'eth'), another name for barred-d. There is also 'smooth' which forms an adjective/verb pair, both with final [dh]. Not all of these work for me either, principally 'booth', which I know only with final [th] (my dictionary says that final [dh] is "esp[ecially] Brit[ish]"). But scythe is quite regular, the OE form being 'si:the' and hence the is intervocalic and should have gone to [dh]. My pronunciation, however, is [sai] and hence is homophonous with 'sigh'. 'Lathe' has a counterpart with final [th] 'lath', but it is not at all sure that the two are related. Both are nouns and 'lathe' is usually considered a loan. Both also have unmarked correlate verbs, 'lath' "to provide with laths," and 'lathe' "to turn on a lathe." 'Swathe' (or 'swath') as a noun meaning "(like) a path cut with a scythe" is difficult because it is mixed up with an unrelated verb 'swathe' "to wrap, bind" (connected with 'swaddle'). 'Tithe' is a frozen form, originally the same as the ordinal number 'tenth' (OE 'te:otha' < 'teogotha'). Both verb and noun are the same and only with [dh]. I won't comment on the place names, but I will point out that the adjective 'blithe' has both pronunciations, with final [th] and with final [dh]. The pronunciation with [dh] is regular since the OE form was 'bli:the'. The adjective 'lithe' is similar in all respects. >> I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include >>"hath", "doth"), and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in >>some dialects). An exception is 'quoth' "said" which is marginalized and has a defective paradigm. It is used only in the past tense, usually with only the first or third person, and regularly has VS word order ("Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'"). Unlike 'hath' or 'doth' the of 'quoth' is part of the root (< OE cwethan). It is not related to 'quote' which is a loan from Latin. It is, however, related to bequeath (or bequeathe), which can have either [th] or [dh]. The corresponding noun, 'bequest', is also irregular, having been influenced by 'quest' (a French loan). So the pattern is truly broken on this one. There are only a few /-Vth/ words that are not nouns: 'beneath', 'both', 'underneath', and, as pointed out, 'with'. 'Beneath' and 'underneath' are compounds, made up of 'be-' and 'under-' combined with 'neothan' "below." The latter element is related to 'nether'. >Agreed, except that certain nouns in final theta can also be >used as verbs. >A common example is the verb 'pith', as in 'pith a frog' (in a >biology lab). This is derived from the noun 'pith'. >A second occurs, a little marginally, in the verb 'mouth off', >which, in my experience, always has theta. There is also 'bad-mouth', which, however, my dictionary lists as either [th] or [dh]. In my experience, 'mouth off' can have either [th] or [dh] as well. My dictionary also records the verb 'mouth' as occurring with either [th] or [dh] although this is recording general 'mouth' with [dh] and 'mouth off' with [th] since it does not have a separate entry for 'mouth off'.. >A third is the peculiarly British use of 'bath' as a verb, as in >'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American >English, and perhaps in all other varieties of English. >A fourth is the verb 'sheath', which is now rather common as an >alternative to the traditional 'sheathe'. >An extremely marginal fifth, which strictly only qualifies here >in non-rhotic accents, is the British use of 'earth' as a verb, >as in 'earth the TV set' (= US 'ground the TV set'). It is quite true that nouns in /-Vth/ can be used as verbs without any change. What we have here is the productive rule of verb formation (NOUN --> VERB / ...) coming into conflict with the markedness rule for verb formation (final spirant voicing rule). As John McLaughlin has gone to some pains to point out, "the" productive rule simply uses the noun as a verb without any modification. The marked noun/verb pairs (with final spirant voicing, which have all been in the language for a long time) are beginning to contrast with unmarked noun/verb pairs created by the productive rule. I suspect that the phonemicity of [th] and [dh] will manifest itself through the resolution of such conflicts. When the verb of the unmarked noun/verb pair and the verb of the marked noun/verb pair have distinct meanings and one always has only [th] and the other always has only [dh], then this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as one verb or the other can have either pronunciation, the distinction is not phonemic. This process, variation leading to change, is an extremely common ingredient of linguistic change. When two forms, created by different rules, are in competition, a number of things may happen: 1) Both forms will continue in use as free variants (thus 'dived', 'dove' [verb]). 2) One form will simply replace the other and the other will disappear ('doth', 'does'). 3) One form (normally the one formed by the productive rule) will become the general form and the other will be marginalized and used in a restricted sense ('brothers', 'brethren'). 4) The two forms will split, each specializing in some meaning and become two separate lexical items. The plural of 'staff' ('staf') was originally 'staves'; then a second plural 'staffs' develops. 'Staves' then acquires a separate meaning from 'staffs' and a singular is formed by reversing the productive rule for plural formation: 'stave'. The result is two lemmata with (slightly) different meanings, 'staff' and 'stave'. Only in the area of musical terminology are the two words coterminous. >As an aside, I have just noticed that OED2 cites the very >obscure noun 'mouthing', meaning 'entrance to a mine', with >theta only -- perhaps somewhat unexpectedly. I don't know what to do with this one either. >Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with >edh, a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with >theta, in my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does >anyone want to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) My dictionary records 'smithy' with either [th] or [dh] and in my dialect the hypocoristicon for a person named Smith is 'Smitty'. But if you use [th] and [dh] to distinguish between a person named Smith and a blacksmith's shop, then /th/ and /dh/ are phonemes in your dialect (and this can't be argued against; de gustibus non est disputandum). But it isn't in mine. And 'Kathy' is fully English in the same way that 'sympathy' and 'pathetic' are. Although 'C/Katherine' (and probably the diminutive 'Kathy') has been in the language longer, they all postdate the sound change that voiced intervocalic spirants. So 'Kathy' follows the same rules, as English as it may be. The question is does [kathi:] contrast with [kadhi:] anywhere? The point is not that English words can't have intervocalic [th]. The point is that all Greek and Latin loans and neologisms in English have intervocalic [th]. There are a number of examples of intervocalic [th] in native English words caused by such things as the position of the stress which caused the voicing rule not to operate or the fact that there was originally a doubled [th] in the word which was subsequently simplified leaving an intervocalic single [th] high and dry. But the point is that the distribution of intervocalic [th] in English is not arbitrary. It can always be accounted for by rule. This is why English can get by with a single graphic symbol for both [th] and [dh]. Even when the English alphabet had separate signs for both sounds, þ (thorn) and ð (edh), they were never used systematically, but were more or less interchangeable. The pronunciation was always predictable. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Oct 17 20:14:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 16:14:05 EDT Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/17/00 1:41:16 PM Mountain Daylight Time, roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: << In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most welcome. >> -- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha >Old Norse merr, 'mare', Old English miere, 'mare', Old High German meriha, 'mare'. There's a Celtic cognate but only with the general meaning of "horse"; Gaulish 'marco', Old Irish 'marc', Welsh 'march'. From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Wed Oct 18 02:25:59 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 18:25:59 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20001006184727.03edd84c@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: The eminent British folklorist Katherine Briggs discusses a range of "bug"/"puca" names used for spirits in Welsh and Irish folklore. Can't remember which of her books it's in though (probably her _Encyclopedia_); sorry, my library's all packed. >I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have >dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I am interested in >finding articles that have been written on either of these two items as >well as more general articles dealing with the folklore and customs >associated with either concept. Max Dashu International Women's Studies since 1970 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Oct 18 14:53:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:53:30 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have > dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I haven't seen any articles, but I'm not aware there's any great mystery about the etymology of either. The OED provides fully documented etymologies for both. The first is built on Old English 'female goblin', the feminine form of 'goblin'. This word is recorded from at least AD 700 in English, and it has established cognates in other Germanic languages. In English, it was applied from the beginning to an imaginary monster which perched on people's chests while they slept and caused them to feel suffocation or other distress. From the late 13th century, the word often came to be reinforced by 'night', in the same sense. The original form 'mare' endured until the 17th century, at least, after which it died out, though Dr. Johnson listed it in his 1755 dictionary. For a long time, 'nightmare' continued to denote the monster, in which sense it competed with the alternative 'night-hag'. Until well into the 19th century, the usual locution was still 'to have the nightmare'. Only in the 19th century does the OED record any citations in which the newer sense of 'bad dream' seems to be intended. Since then, this has become the only sense, and the locution has become 'to have a nightmare'. With the disappearance of the original 'mare' from the language, an obvious folk-etymology has led to the reinterpretation of the second part of 'nightmare' as the unrelated word 'mare' (= 'female horse'). As for 'bugbear', this appears to be built on the obsolete word 'bug', meaning 'an object of terror, especially an imaginary one', 'bogey man'. This is suspected of deriving from an early Welsh word 'ghost', 'hobgoblin'. This 'bug' is recorded from the late 14th century to the early 18th century, since when it has died out. The compound 'bugbear' is recorded from the late 16th century, and its second element is apparently the ordinary word 'bear', the animal name. It originally denoted an imaginary monster, presumably in the shape of a bear, which supposedly ate naughty children, and which was used by nurses to threaten children. This sense eventually died out in favor of the more general sense of 'an object of needless dread', 'imaginary terror'. It is possible, though far from certain, that the original 'bug' is continued in 'bogey man'. The problem is that 'bogey man' is not recorded until long after the original 'bug' had apparently disappeared from the language. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Oct 18 03:01:05 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 22:01:05 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2000 10:57 AM > besides *sreu- "to flow" Watkins 1985 gives > *srebh- "to suck, absorb" < ? *sreu- in the sense of "to (make) flow in" ? > and also superficially resembles Arabic sh-r-b- "to drink" [PR] I believe that Arabic sh-r-b, 'to drink', is relatable to Egyptian S3b, 'meals, food', and that the basic meaning is '(movement down the) throat'. I have found in my own Nostratic studies that Ar./Egy. sh = IE gw-/kw-. Therefore, I believe that the underlying biliteral root corresponds to IE *gwer-, 'swallow, throat'; and that a group of derivations like English 'grub' should be related to a presently non-acknowledged IE *gwrebh- rather than the presently reconstructed *ghrebh-. A key cognate in this context appears to me to be OHG gruoba, 'excavation, throat'. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) [ Moderator's note: If further discussion of possible Nostratic etymologies is desired, please move them to that mailing list. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Oct 18 15:49:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 10:49:59 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >I won't comment on the place names, but I will point out that the >adjective 'blithe' has both pronunciations, with final [th] and >with final [dh]. The pronunciation with [dh] is regular since >the OE form was 'bli:the'. The adjective 'lithe' is similar in >all respects. My impression is that US pronunciations for are regional perhaps analogous to the greasy-greazy pronunciations in this one case In Ohio, where I grew up, I only heard /blaiTH/ but in the South (South Carolina, Mississippi) I usually hear /blaiDH/ What is the usual British pronunciation? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Thu Oct 19 03:09:09 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 19:09:09 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Joat Simeon writes, >-- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', >possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha >>Old Norse merr, 'mare', Old English miere, 'mare', Old High German meriha, >'mare'. >There's a Celtic cognate but only with the general meaning of "horse"; >Gaulish 'marco', Old Irish 'marc', Welsh 'march'. There's another root, mahra, having to do with spirits and night hags. My notes are all packed for moving, so I can't offer details, but variants of this word are found across a wide range of IE languages. Max Dashu From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Oct 19 07:35:24 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:35:24 +0200 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following quotation is from a post by JoatSimeon at aol.com dated 17 Oct. --rma ] >In a message dated 10/17/00 1:41:16 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find > those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' > that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most > welcome. >> >-- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', >possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha Fine, but what does this have to do with "nightmare" ? Is it a horse which haunts you at night ? Well, not me, I'm afraid. What does haunt people in bad nights is a (Germ.) "Mahr" (G. /Nachtmahr/ is the equivalent to e. /nightmare/). A /Mahr/ is a.k.o. demon, ghost osthlth, OHG /mara/, OE /mare/, ON /mara/; this is also found in Slavic, Czech /mu:ra/, russ. (kiki-)mora, and in Celtic, OIr /morri:gain/. IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.". No horses here. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Thu Oct 19 11:19:18 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:19:18 +0100 Subject: re Minimal pairs Message-ID: With some variation in the vowel, the British/English English pronunciations are all blaidh ('Hail to thee, blithe spirit ...'; Blyth in Northumberland; Blythe Bridge in Staffordshire). But I am not omniscient in these matters .... [The late Professor E Fraenkel was unaware that 'threepence' is/was (in the days of shillings and pence at 20/240 to the pound sterling) in some places pronounced as 'three' plus 'pence', not the 'threppence' or 'thruppence' which were the most common articulations. For some reason, after the pound turned into 100 pence instead (by way of 100 new pence, everyone took up the 'three pence' version, perhaps because of a tendency on the part of some to say X pee, not X pence, and the insertion of the 'new'. And a new locution 'one pence' appeared as well. Do not know if this new singular is yet in any part of the OED. Sorry - that looks more relevant to another current thread.] Gordon At 10:49 am 18/10/00, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] >My impression is that US pronunciations for are >regional perhaps analogous to the greasy-greazy pronunciations in this one >case >In Ohio, where I grew up, I only heard /blaiTH/ but in the South (South >Carolina, Mississippi) I usually hear /blaiDH/ >What is the usual British pronunciation? From sarima at friesen.net Fri Oct 20 03:38:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 20:38:07 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:59 PM 10/15/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >But scythe is quite regular, the OE form being 'si:the' and hence >the is intervocalic and should have gone to [dh]. My >pronunciation, however, is [sai] and hence is homophonous with >'sigh'. Fascinating. Mine is the "expected" [saidh] - both as a verb and a noun. >'Swathe' (or 'swath') as a noun meaning "(like) a path cut with a >scythe" is difficult because it is mixed up with an unrelated >verb 'swathe' "to wrap, bind" (connected with 'swaddle'). Which my dialect has resolved by losing the verb. >It is quite true that nouns in /-Vth/ can be used as verbs >without any change. What we have here is the productive rule of >verb formation (NOUN --> VERB / ...) coming into conflict with >the markedness rule for verb formation (final spirant voicing >rule). The problem I have here is that, at least in my dialect, that latter rule is no longer productive (in the sense of "used to spontaneously form new words"). Nobody I know would expect to be able to create a verb by this means that would be *understood* as such (except by context). >this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as one verb or the >other can have either pronunciation, the distinction is not >phonemic. Here I disagree - I would treat most such pairs either as synonymous words that happen to be similar, or as dialectal variants. This would only rule out phoneme status if *all* such pairs had identical meanings. If even a *few* show different meanings based on the difference in pronunciation, then that is sufficient to establish phoneme status. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Sat Oct 21 06:27:51 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 19:27:51 +1300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] -----Original Message----- From: Robert Whiting [mailto:whiting at cc.helsinki.fi] Sent: Monday, 16 October 2000 12:54 a.m. RW> On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: [ moderator snip ] RC>> I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are talking about the RC>> synchronic phonology of modern English, and (ii) the reality that we are RC>> trying to get at is what is in speakers' heads. RW> First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about the synchronic RW> phonology of modern English. About the second point, I am much less RW> sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how language works RW> linguistically (some areas are easier than others), but I don't think that RW> we are in a position to say what goes on in a speaker's head to produce RW> language. While it would certainly be nice to know, I think that the RW> cognitive processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the RW> moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you RW> can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we can get at RW> is the language that speakers produce. RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on empirically RW> verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a hypothesis about how RW> native speakers produce their language. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is RW> an explanation put forward to account for observable facts. People tend to RW> forget this and consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality RW> may exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the present time RW> with our present knowledge. In general, I agree that what we are trying to RW> get at is the reality in speakers' heads, but it is a roundabout road that RW> we have to take and we have to have a realistic picture of language before RW> we are likely to get there. I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to another, and hence subject to the same epistemological vulnerability you attribute to the latter. So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being based are of the same sort. On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is "realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without reference to any possible mental reality? RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further assumption that RC>> native speakers of modern English (in general, not just linguists) RC>> distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, and that the words I listed RC>> with /th/ in voiced environments are marked as "foreign". Since I don't RC>> share this assumption, I would like to know what evidence leads you to it. RC>> Do you have any such evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these RC>> hundreds of words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? RW> Let me answer this from back to front. RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by rule the RW> [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other than hundreds of RW> examples and the fact that it produces a nice phonological generalization. This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for Grimm's Law or RW> Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide RW> a nice phonological generalization. No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and /dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. [ moderator snip ] RW> As for what evidence I have that native speakers are able to keep track of RW> foreign words (although not necessarily specifically as "foreign" words), I RW> have already quoted Hock 1986 elsewhere, but for the sake of overkill, I RW> will quote it here again: RW> The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it RW> suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively RW> different from the other nativization processes: It does not RW> really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into RW> the language without losing track of the fact that they are RW> and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been RW> around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and RW> in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may RW> slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. RW> Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, RW> but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. RW> Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396-97 RW> This is only one person's opinion, but I don't doubt that similar RW> statements could be found in other textbooks of historical linguistics, so RW> I will consider it as evidence that native speakers can recognize foreign RW> words, if they have not been phonologically nativized, for a considerable RW> time after they have entered the language, by their phonological RW> peculiarities. The general possibility is not in question; the question is about particular examples. Hock offers evidence in the Old Irish case, namely the failure of p-initial words "for some time" to participate in the lenition process. This would certainly mark them as exceptional in that respect. But note that he does not argue that the mere fact of having initial p- is evidence of their "foreign" status. RW> If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized pronunciation of RW> 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after it entered the language RW> (first attested in 1601 according to my dictionary). Actually, my American Heritage dictionary gives a fully anglicized pronunciation /S'æns at n/ (initial sh-, rhymes with "Manson"), but I admit I've never heard it. The word has probably been re-introduced once or twice since 1601, but the persistence of the nasal-vowel pronunciation is no mystery: the word refers to specifically French things (medieval epic poems or 19th-20th century popular songs), and it is used almost entirely by people who have some familiarity with French and could tell you (if you would allow this as data) that it's a French word. RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still recognize RW> foreign words after several centuries or not. The pronunciation rules are RW> marked in the lexicon. The native speaker learns these rules and follows RW> them. It is these rules that produce the pattern, not the speaker's RW> perception of the words as native or non-native. RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of RW> loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the pattern created by the RW> presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in English words. This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. RW> But first it is necessary to show that a pattern actually exists. If there RW> is no pattern, which the theory relies on, then the theory is falsified. RW> While the fact that the six typical English words that you offered as RW> examples (pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur) are RW> indeed all loan words is suggestive, it is not really sufficient. RW> To see if there is a pattern, I have taken a lemmatized list of English RW> words based on the British National Corpus (BNC) available on the web at RW> http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html [ moderator snip ] RW> One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 lemmata with RW> intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native (and 5 of these are RW> clearly derivative). You say that there are hundreds of these words in the RW> language (and so there are, if not thousands). This makes one point quite RW> clear. While there may be quite a large number of loan words in English, RW> the core vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily RW> native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences in a RW> corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you eliminate RW> derivatives) of these lemmata. I'm not sure this elaborate demonstration was necessary. Nobody disputes that the pattern exists in words of OE origin. Nor is it any secret that non-OE words are less frequent in basic vocabulary than in the lexicon at large. RW> This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the lemmata with RW> intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. The larger one's RW> vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as an absolute, but as a RW> percentage of the total) one is likely to know. Vocabulary size is also RW> correlated with educational level. Hence by the time that one has acquired RW> a large number of such lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated RW> to realize that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are RW> not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even RW> mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor often RW> consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. Thus my test of RW> the pronunciation of these words may not be entirely accurate, since I am RW> relying on my own pronunciation and on the pronunciation given by the RW> dictionary. As a turnabout, if you have evidence that native speakers RW> regularly mispronounce these words because they don't know that they are RW> loans, that would be germane. I'm puzzled by you asking me for this evidence. As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says (among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. Only the more educated and literate speakers may realize that these exceptional words are loans. (Surely, however, this is not a function of the number of such words in one's vocabulary, but of things one reads or is taught.) Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking for such evidence. By the way, 6318 words is a pretty basic vocabulary. And your list doesn't include some words (arithmetic, ether, various personal names) that were part of my vocabulary and that of all my contemporaries by the age of 10. RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the speakers of RW> the language is the fact that the pattern exists. For if there is a RW> pattern in a language, synchronically it must be created by its speakers RW> because that is the only place that language comes from. If the pattern is RW> not created by rule, then it is simple coincidence. No, this is where you go wrong. The pattern has been created by historical changes in the language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their rule-governed language behaviour. RW> You said above that RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments RC>> are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, RC>> ... RW> You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact that words in RW> English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly loan words because the RW> speakers of the language are unaware that these are loans. As I mentioned RW> above, this is not just a weak argument, it is a spurious one. It may be RW> true that most speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is RW> irrelevant to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then RW> most linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a RW> language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic mechanisms of RW> their language. Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any way. Your only basis for disagreement seems to be that your single-phoneme analysis requires them to be marked as exceptions. Other evidence one might imagine, such as deviant morphophonemic behaviour, acquisition difficulties, or the existence of more "nativized" variants, appears to be entirely lacking. Excuse me. I'm tired, and I see there are at least a dozen paragraphs left. I'll snip them for now, and perhaps we can return to them another time, if this has not drifted too far off-topic for IE. Ross Clark From sarima at friesen.net Fri Oct 20 03:43:09 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 20:43:09 -0700 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:53 PM 10/18/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: >In English, it was applied from the beginning to an imaginary monster >which perched on people's chests while they slept and caused them >to feel suffocation or other distress. ... >... Until well into >the 19th century, the usual locution was still 'to have the nightmare'. Well, it seems I often have the nightmare - I have a condition called sleep apnea which causes me to frequently stop breathing while asleep (unless treated). The description above sounds like a pre-modern explanation of apnea. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Oct 20 05:58:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 01:58:24 EDT Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/19/2000 6:04:37 PM, Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Fine, but what does this have to do with "nightmare" ? Is it a horse which haunts you at night? Well, not me, I'm afraid. What does haunt people in bad nights is a (Germ.) "Mahr" (G. /Nachtmahr/ is the equivalent to e. /nightmare/).... IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.".>> Now, hold your horses there, pilgrim. :-) There may be a little bit of horse involved in the history of this word/concept. One of the earliest descriptions of a severe incident of nightmare appears in the "Ynglingasaga": "Then Drífa sent for Huld, a seithr kona, and sent Vísbur, her son by Vanlandi, to Sweden. Drífa prevailed upon Huld by gifts that she should conjure Vanlandi back to Finnland or else kill him. At the time when she exercised her seithr, Vanlandi was at Uppsala. Then he became eager to go to Finnland; but his friends and counselors stayed him from doing so, saying that most likely it was the witchcraft of the Finns which caused his longing. Then a drowsiness came over him and he lay down to sleep. But he had hardly gone to sleep when he called out, saying that a mara rode him. His men went to him and wanted to help him. But when they took hold of his head the mara trod on his legs so they nearly broke; and when they seized his feet it stepped down down on his head so that he died." (Ynglingasaga,13) Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." The connection also comes up in Old French, in which the OED mentions , nightmare. is to trample and seems also to refer to the work of a horse or other large animal. In the other direction, some of the earliest instances in English mention the Greek, as a medical reference I think, , "nightmare" which is specifically defined as early as Homer as a "throttling demon" that comes at night. Parallel to the Finnish witch's conjuring in the saga, the meaning in Greek seems to be from (fut. epialo:), to set upon, to send something after someone. But it seems there was one instance where a miswrite also turned into , Middle Latin/Greek for "saddled". The irony seems to be that the accidental connection with horses comes from every which direction. But obviously as early as there are sources in English and ON we see some kind of allusion to "riding" and "trampling." (And clearly the mara is not just any goblin or spirit, it is already in 700AD an "incubus.") In "The Conception of the Nightmare in Sweden" Tillhagen, Carl-Herman; in Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folklore,etc. eds. Wayland D. Hand and Gustave O. Arlt. J.J. Augistin. 1960. pp. 317-329, (a cite for you Roz), the tradition seems to be that the "marr" can take the shape of a horse or an elk or other large animal and actually take you for a ride, where you get all banged up and die. Stefan Georg also writes: << OHG /mara/, OE /mare/, ON /mara/; this is also found in Slavic, Czech /mu:ra/, russ. (kiki-)mora, and in Celtic, OIr/morri:gain/. IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.". >> Something else. The original OED cites the "synonymous Polish" , but there is another word in Polish, , that meant nothing more than to dream or to imagine. And that brings up other words that refer to illusion or deception: "ma:rrach, a thicket to catch cattle. Root: mar, mer, deceive, as in mear brath." (McBain's Etym Dictionary of Gaelic) and the Greek , folly, delusion. But, given the trampling and crushing theme in all the early accounts, perhaps the Sanskrit , to crush, and the Latin , hammer, are worth noting. Perhaps "mara" was originally a nickname, like "Old Scratch", for a spirit of the night called "Mr. Crush." In any case, it feels like there are just too many possible twist and turns in the etymologies to warrant much confidence in there having been a specific word "*mora:" that meant "ghost, malevolent spirit" in PIE, whether or not that word can be reconstructed based on rather simplified semantics. Regards, Steve Long PS - Good to see you all back on the list. From cnarayan at socrates.Berkeley.EDU Mon Oct 23 04:03:54 2000 From: cnarayan at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Chandan Narayan) Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 21:03:54 -0700 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: <87.1ba1791.27213900@aol.com> Message-ID: Dear IE-ists, I don't know if this reference has been brought up as i'm new to this discussion, but Wendy Doniger addresses and discusses the Indo-European Mare quite thoroughly in her _Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts_ (Chicago, 1980). Sorry if this is old news. Best, Chandan Narayan chandan r. narayan || cnarayan at socrates.berkeley.edu || socrates.berkeley.edu/~cnarayan "You couldn't fool your mother on the most foolingist day of your life, even if you had an electrified fooling machine. " From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Oct 23 08:28:07 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 09:28:07 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: Steve Long writes [on 'nightmare']: > There may be a little bit of horse involved in the history of this > word/concept. One of the earliest descriptions of a severe incident of > nightmare appears in the "Ynglingasaga": [snip part of story] > But he had hardly > gone to sleep when he called out, saying that a mara rode him. His men went > to him and wanted to help him. But when they took hold of his head the mara > trod on his legs so they nearly broke; and when they seized his feet it > stepped down down on his head so that he died." (Ynglingasaga,13) > Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara > "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might > have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in > some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from > 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." Yes, but the Old English verb did not mean exclusively 'sit on a horse'. It also commonly meant 'sit on (anything)', 'perch on (anything)'. This use is attested as early as Beowulf, according to the OED, and it was common in early English. It is still in the language today. So, there is nothing odd about speaking of the (night)mare as 'riding' its victim. Nor can I see this as implying anything horsey: we ride horses, but horses don't ride us. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Oct 24 12:17:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 08:17:02 EDT Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: I wrote: > Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara > "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might > have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in > some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from > 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." In a message dated 10/23/2000 9:14:26 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <> Well, the original OED does not have it as quite that common at all, and gives the definition of a non-horse use (that I believe you are referring to) with a key qualification: "To sit or be carried on or upon something after the manner of one on horseback..." So the usage you refer to is sent right back to horses, an analogy. Almost all the early quotes cited apply to horses or other animals, especially the intransitive. I believe even the first use of ride with a wagon is only dated from 1300. And the earlier etymology given have to do with "traveling" and nothing to do with sitting or perching. There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall upon you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, only the mare "rides" you. In an earlier message, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << With the disappearance of the original 'mare' from the language, an obvious folk-etymology has led to the reinterpretation of the second part of 'nightmare' as the unrelated word 'mare' (= 'female horse'). >> And of course there is no reason why "mare" wouldn't have been interpreted this way before it disappeared from the language. It would be odd indeed if early folk didn't see the possible connection, but all of a sudden it struck everyone when "night" was added. Especially when we are told that the "mare-induced bad dream is called... martrö (mare-ride) in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, mareridt (mare-ride) in Danish, mareritt (mare-ride) in Norwegian,..." And it's quite clear that the victims in the more dramatic examples are not merely be being perched or sat on, but as in the "Ynglingasaga" are being stomped to death. Larry Trask also writes: <> I don't know about that!!! I won't ask how often you get "ridden" every day. Or night. I guess that the habit of battling dubious etymologies can motivate one to find it common for all sorts of things to "ride" humans. The last time anything "rode" me, however, it was a five-year old who kept yelling, "giddy-up!" Not something I have had happen to me otherwise. And so rather odd indeed. <<...we ride horses, but horses don't ride us.>> Unless, of course, that riding is done by "mares." Meanings are never as neat and tidy as we'd like for them to be. Meanings definitely don't follow the paths of genetic descent. Meanings keep popping up in the wrong pigeon-holes. Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Oct 25 10:25:36 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 13:25:36 +0300 Subject: "nightmare" In-Reply-To: <5a.c380346.2726d7be@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the > ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall upon > you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, only > the mare "rides" you. Then what is the origin of the expressions 'priest-ridden' and 'hag-ridden'? Or is 'hag-ridden' a folk etymology of *'nag-ridden'? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Oct 25 15:02:27 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 17:02:27 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Response to the comments made on Sun, 15 Oct. 2000 by Robert Whiting : Overall, I detect in your contributions a concerted attack on the traditional concept of "phoneme". Instead of being the smallest distinctive unit of speech, a phoneme then becomes an abstract concept which, after the application of a number of similarly abstract rules, is transformed into the speech sound we actually hear. I do not like the direction into which this will take us, because then a marvellously simple tool of descriptive linguistics will disappear. To illustrate my comments, let us look at the voiceless/voiced contrast of intravocalic dental fricatives in English. If we regard the two sounds as different phonemes, we have a very simple way to transcribe phonemically "faith" and "bathe" as /feth/ and /bedh/, respectively (/th/ and /dh/ obviously standing for the symbols theta and edh). If I understand your approach, you would represent these two words something like /feth + foreign (or - verb?)/ and /beth +verb/, respectively. What on earth is the advantage here? Shouldn't simplicity be an important criterion in linguistics (or any other descriptive science)? I do not dispute the fact that in languages there can be, and often are, patterns in phoneme distribution that are correlated with morphological factors, vocabulary origin and the like. There can also be marginal phonemes that occur in a few words only. Indeed, phonemes may occur only in words recently borrowed, e.g. /b/ and /g/ in Finnish. There must still be, IMHO, an unambiguous way to denote such sounds without reference to non-phonetic criteria. If we don't subscribe to this principle, there is no end to the complications that ingenious linguists can introduce into the description of languages. Now for additional points related to your posting: (RW) >... we are indeed talking about the >synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second point, >I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how >language works linguistically (some areas are easier than >others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say what >goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it would >certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive processes >that produce language are beyond our reach at the moment. >Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you >can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we >can get at is the language that speakers produce. (GS) I agree with this completely. We cannot get into people's heads, therefore - until our knowledge of neurology improves drastically - we should consider the brain as a black box. All evidence about language should be based on observations of how language is used. (RW) >Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on >empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a >hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >to get there. (GS) Has anybody really claimed that synchronic grammar is in some way real? It is real only insofar as it is a human artifact, just as philosophy and esthetics are, for example. Otherwise, synthetic grammar should be considered as just a model of the rules that govern actual language use. If this model is contradicted by observed language use, it is clearly false and should be corrected. (snip) (RW) >You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by >rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other >than hundreds of examples and the fact that it produces a nice >phonological generalization. This seems rather like asking what >evidence I have for Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than >hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide a nice >phonological generalization. What more can one ask of a theory >(or hypothesis or law) than that it account for the observed data >in a consistent and concise manner and that it provide a reliable >generalization? Nothing, really, except, of course, that it have >a test for falsification. (GS) Do people question the validity of your generalization? Given that we know a lot about the history of English, we can see that there is indeed a pattern, and that, indeed, intervocalic /th/ is restricted to borrowed words. But it's only because we know the history of English that we can say this - if we didn't know it, there would be no objective criteria telling us that, say, "author" is borrowed and "feather" is not. Marking "author" as +borrowed as part of the proof that only borrowed words have intervocalic [th] sounds like a circular argument to me. To show how easy it would be to lead us astray with such arguments, let us consider Indo-European /b/. This is widely known to be a rare phoneme in PIE, and I would love to be able to show that it was actually absent from early stages of the proto-language, and all its occurrences are in late loanwords, assimilations and the like. *abol (apple) and *belos (strong) are among the few words where *b may be reconstructed, so why not claim that they are borrowings? I would be hesitant to do so, however, because there is no independent evidence that they are borrowings, and the claim is easily seen to be made for the specific purpose of proving something about the absence of PIE *b. (snip) Since I don't at all dispute that there is a pattern in the distribution of th/dh in English, let me reiterate what I think is my main point: For the description of a language, it is essential to have recourse to phonemes as basic building blocks of speech. If two sounds are in actual or potential contrast, they belong to different phonemes. This is true even if in most (or even all) of their occurrences the choice as to which one occurs is predictable based on some non-phonetic criteria. Of course, if you manage to expropriate the term "phoneme" for your purposes, those of us needing the concept for the original use of the term (say, in order to show the pronunciation of words in a dictionary) will have to call phonemes something else, won't we... All the best, Gabor Sandi From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Oct 26 02:22:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:22:48 -0500 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: I hesitate (perhaps not enough) to get into this, but people DO know what the phonemes of their language are, they just don't know what the term means. Practically speaking, it is fairly easy to determine that /r/ and /l/ are not separate phonemes in Japanese, or /p/ and /ph/ in English, merely by speaking as if they are and noting the bewildered look on unsophisticated native faces ... I believe Sapir has a comment somewhere to the effect that if you want to know whether something is a phoneme in an Indian's language, ask him. You just have to ask the right, i.e. indirect, question, not "Is this a phoneme?", but "Is this a possible different word?" I think Sapir probably had enough experience that he should know. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Oct 26 02:38:03 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:38:03 EDT Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/25/2000 8:08:27 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: << Then what is the origin of the expressions 'priest-ridden' and 'hag-ridden'? Or is 'hag-ridden' a folk etymology of *'nag-ridden'? >> OED I has a number of difference references to hag as some kind of spirit, but none of them occur before the 16th century in English. More importantly, the ONLY one I see where the hag "rides" is in the following from 1696: "It is to prevent the Night-Mare (viz.) the Hag from riding their Horses." In some cases, it seems it is a witch (as in the Ynglingasaga) that sends or brings the mare. This is the "ride" that gets the mare to the victim, sometimes on horseback, rather than the "riding" of the victim. Kveldulf Hagen Gundarsson writes in "The Folklore of the Wild Hunt and the Furious Host": "Witches are also called "mirk-riders" (Harbardhzliodh 20) and "evening-riders" (Helgakvidha Hjorvardhzsonar 15), though these latter titles may refer to the magical act of nightmare-riding, rather than to the haunting ride through the air, such as that carried out by the 'Darradhrljodh' valkyries..." (Mountain Thunder (Cambridge Folklore Soc.), issue 7,1992.) But it seems from what I can gather that the business of the non-"mare" kind of "hags" is not "riding" victims at all, though they do come specifically at night to suck your blood or "change" your children or as just plain harbingers, sometimes on horseback or even on reindeer. (As to "priest-ridden" I see no reference to it in several different volumes. Sounds kind of Joycean.) Going back to my original statement: > There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the > ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall > upon you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, > only the mare "rides" you. This still SEEMS to be true. But I have no clear idea of why it would be so. Folk etymology (AS: mare ride and mareridt) may be an explanation. But if it is, it seems to be very old and remarkably congruent for two supposedly distinct ideas. On the other hand, the Greeks (ephilates) and Romans (suppressio nocturea; later Latin, incubo) seem to have named the phenomenon directly, unambiguously and without any reference to either "mare" or "ride". So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole idea ran in Basque.) Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Oct 26 02:40:23 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:40:23 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Forgive me if my mind is, as usual since the sudden onset of testosterone poisoning many years ago, languishing in the gutter (all the best stuff is down there), or if we have covered this during my absence, but is not the expression being "ridden by the nightmare" what is known as sexual reference, to succubus dreams with "woman on top" and all that stuff? In the middle ages of Northwestern Europe, apart from the feeling that sex was evil, and if it felt good did so in roughly the same sense that "bodily functions" might be said to, there was also the feeling that for a man to be the passive partner was inherently effeminate and therefore shameful. We see this for example in Norse attitudes toward homosexuality. With both these syndromes operating, it is small wonder that dreams of this sort where a man feels himself "ridden" by a spirit could be regarded as traumatizing, which is to say as nightmares. From there the more general meaning is (duh) a generalization, no? Things like "priest-ridden" are, I have always thought, by analogy with things like "flea-ridden" and "tick-ridden", where the creatures in question could most certainly by said to be literally riding their unfortunate hosts. The semantic leap from "ridden" to "infested" under such circumstances is surely not a great one. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Oct 27 14:45:02 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 15:45:02 +0100 Subject: word a day? Message-ID: There used to be a web site with a PIE root and its derivatives, changed once a day. Anyone know what the address is? My search machines have failed me. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Oct 29 16:03:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 16:03:05 +0000 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in > nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be > reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and > complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole > idea ran in Basque.) The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and 'succubus'. Other Basque words, like and , are used much more generally, to denote just about any kind of hobgoblin or imp. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Sun Oct 29 22:18:12 2000 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 09:18:12 +1100 Subject: "nightmare" In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:38:03 EDT." Message-ID: So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole idea ran in Basque.) The common contemporary word in Basque is "amesgaizto" which translates as "bad dream". I'm unaware of any older expression that might shed light on the current discussion Jon Patrick ______________________________________________________________ From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Oct 31 03:43:15 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 22:43:15 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In the Island of Sheep (published I think in the 1920's John Buchan has the following collocation: "The Trolls ..... hag-rode the cattle, and sucked the blood of young lambs ..." -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com To: Indo-European at xkl.com Date: Saturday, October 28, 2000 5:32 PM Subject: Re: "nightmare" [ moderator snip ] From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk Mon Oct 30 18:41:21 2000 From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 18:41:21 +0000 Subject: word a day? Message-ID: Peter You may find what you're looking for on 'The Indo-European Database'. Go to http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/atoday.html and click on 'Today's root". (you can find back pages via http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/project/phonetics/). Best Bruce [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Oct 31 06:50:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 01:50:31 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Way, way back on 14 Mar 2000, g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote: <> Hopefully the statue of limitations hasn't run out on this particular exchange. Putting aside for now the factual basis for horse-riding hero-worshippers carrying IE into "much of Europe," there's a point here that raises a linguistic question that might provide linguistic evidence of what actually happened back then. If "the farming population of much of Europe switched language" to IE (by conquest or otherwise) from something other than IE, then of course there may be that "substratal influence" to find. Or, by analogy with the examples given, "plenty of substratal influence." But there is an interesting twist to this substrate issue proposed by none other than Cavalli-Sforza: "It should be noted that [Renfrew's] hypothesis is not incompatible with Gimbutas' hypothesis. It is perfectly possible that neolithic farmers brought early Indo-European languages not only to Europe but also to southern Russia, together with agriculture, and that their descendants, who developed nomadic pastoralism in the Kurgan steppes carried their languages, which was still of Indo-European origin but transformed from the original.... If this fusion of hypothesis from Gimbutas and Renfrew is correct, the proto-Indo-European language reconstructed by linguists on the basis of [sic] modern Indo-European languages must be much closer to that which was spoken in the Kurgan area some five or six millennia ago, than to the pre-proto-Indo-European spoken by Anatolian farmers." L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The Spread of Agriculture and Nomadic Pastoralism, from The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, edited by David R. Harris, Smithsonian Institution Press (1996), 66. Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would ultimately be of the same origin? Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Oct 31 18:46:22 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 11:46:22 -0700 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000a01c03ef3$a30eb900$046163d1@texas.net> Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > I hesitate (perhaps not enough) to get into this, but people DO know what the > phonemes of their language are, they just don't know what the term means.... > I believe Sapir has a comment somewhere to the effect that if you want to > know whether something is a phoneme in an Indian's language, ask him. You > just have to ask the right, i.e. indirect, question, not "Is this a > phoneme?", but "Is this a possible different word?" I think Sapir probably > had enough experience that he should know. You're probably referring to the famous paper "On the Psychological Reality of Phonemes" (reprinted in David Mandelbaum's collection of Sapir's most influential papers). To briefly summarize and simplify for clarity what Sapir experienced with Tony Tillohash (his Kaibab Southern Paiute consultant), and simplifying the phonetics for the ASCII character set, the citation form for 'water' in Colorado River Numic (the single language of which Southern Paiute, Ute, and Chemehuevi are dialects) is [pa], but when it is the second element of a compound, it is [-va], as in 'big water' [piava]. When Sapir asked Tony to say the word with compounded pa ([-va]) slowly, he consistently said, [pi-a-pa] rather than [pi-a-va]. He then used this to demonstrate how surface phonetics do not interfere with native speakers' intuition about what the sound "really is". My experience in working with Numic languages over the past 25 years, however, has shown that this is not quite so simple. When untrained native speakers have developed their own spelling systems for these seven languages, they have not written the equivalent of pa and piapa, but fairly consistently write the equivalent of pa and piava. The "linguistically accurate" orthography that Wick Miller and Beverly Crum (a native speaker) developed for Gosiute and Western Shoshoni over 30 years ago (which would spell pa and piapa) has not spread within the Shoshoni community beyond the areas where Crum was influential. In contrast, more recent linguists, such as Chris Loether and Drusilla Gould (a native speaker), working on Northern Shoshoni; Pam Bunte and Rob Franklin, working on San Juan Southern Paiute; Arnie Poldevaart, working on Nevada Northern Paiute; Kay Fowler and Harold Abel (a native speaker), working on Nevada Northern Paiute; Talmy Givon, working on Southern Ute; Maurice Zigmond, Chris Booth, and Pam Munro, working on Kawaiisu; Chris Loether and Rosalie Bethel (a native speaker), working on Western Mono; and Lucille McClung and Albert Nahquaddy (both native speakers) along with Alice Anderton, working on Comanche, have all used a more phonetically-based writing system that native speakers seem to prefer much more than that based on "native intuition". While writing systems are not always the best evidence of "native intuition", it's something we can actually put our hands on rather than anecdotal evidence. The Numic consonant gradation processes run the gamut from language to language from being totally frozen relics, to being highly productive modern processes, but throughout the family, the evidence is clear that native speakers prefer piava over piapa. Probably the best indication of the direction which native speakers are actually leaning is the Idaho State University Shoshoni system (the one that I promote with Shoshoni bands that haven't adopted an official writing system yet). There they use b instead of v and spell ba and biaba. That's a lot closer to the psychological reality which Sapir observed, but working from the "inside out", so to speak. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 Tue Oct 31 23:27:26 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 17:27:26 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <32.c08e79c.272fc5b7@aol.com> Message-ID: >My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look >for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to >speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language >-- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would >one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would >ultimately be of the same origin? It's an interesting question On one hand, there is Alt-Europaeisch hydronyms, toponyms, etc. and on the other there is the Lusitanian-Ligurian-Sorotactic-Mediterranean-"Other Italic"-Illyrian-etc. continuum of substrate lexicon and toponyms of IE origin Are these categories too frequently convenient tags for explaining oddball lexicon? Larry Trask often mentions Basque being used as the rubbish bin of unexplained Ibero-Romance etyma Etruscan sometimes serves the same purpose for Latin, even though some of the vocabulary is claerly of IE origin; e.g. I saw a reference to Tuscan dialect brenti "heather" that declared it to be from Etruscan, yet there are cognate forms in Ibero-Romance and I'd guess that Irish fraoch is also cognate Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Oct 2 14:31:50 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 08:31:50 -0600 Subject: Linguasphere Message-ID: Besides being a native speaker of one, I'm mostly on on-looker to the IE languages, so I'd like to know what people think about the I-E section of David Dalby's recently published Linguasphere volume. I've got some corrections to bring to his attention in the section of languages I work on (Numic of Uto-Aztecan), so I'd specifically like the impressions you might have about his decisions on "outer languages" versus "inner languages" in respect to mutual intelligibility issues. Thanks. (My copy is numbered 052, so I hope that at least some of you represent copies 1-51.) John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Oct 2 17:20:44 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:20:44 -0600 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" In-Reply-To: <39350822DFB@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 May 2000, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Latin `do, dare' continues the IE root {d-H3} = Greek {dido:mi} = "give". But > many of its supposed compounds, e.g. `addo' = "add", `abdo' = "hide", have > nothing to do with transfer of ownership and look more like as if made from a > root meaning "put". Thus I suspect that in pre-literary Italic times there > was confusion with the outcome of PIE {dheH1} = "put" (= Greek {tithe:mi}). I suppose "adficio, adficere" would have to be a later formation then. Etymologically it would be the same as "addo, addere". And this pre-literary Italic would have to be pretty early, if I am not mistaken, for the change to /f/ not to have occurred, though perhaps theresome evidence I am unaware of for this being late. Furthermore, I am not sure about the semantics being so strained. Note that subtraction, like addition, does not necessarily involve ownership, yet this does not stop us from using expressions like "take away" ("take" being the opposite of "give" to describe. Perhaps "give" was re-analyzed as being almost a motion verb. For a rough parallel, one may note how the Celtic languages (Welsh anyway) use "come with" to mean "bring" (certainly realted in meaning to "give") and "go with" to mean "take". DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Oct 2 17:32:58 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:32:58 -0600 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" In-Reply-To: <39350822DFB@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: Addendum: I should have used "afficio", which is I believe the normal form, rather than "adficio", to stop everyone from saying "Of course "adficio" is a reformation, otherwise it would be "afficio".' By the way, for those of you who may vaguely remember me, I am now Dr. White (though still unemployable as ever), so I suppose if I do not act like an idiot (now there's a big if), I deserve to be treated with respect ... DLW From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 01:39:37 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 20:39:37 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE Message-ID: Dear Dennis and IEists: [ moderator snip ] I believe *sreu- is probably an s-mobile formation from *ereu-, 'to move swiftly'; *ser-, from which it has been derived, is rather, IMHO, an s-mobile of the simpler form *3. er-. I have written a short essay on s-mobile which some list-members may want to take a look at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/IE-s-mobile.htm I believe "when s-mobile is combined with r-, a /-t-/ is inserted [s-t-r-] for euphony and ease of pronunciation: e.g. *2. streig-, "stiff", from *s- + (reig^-), "stretch out".) In the case of *sreu-, if we did not assume a euphonic insertion of -t- in *sreu- to produce 'stream', then we would have to reconstruct *s(t)reu-, which I think should be done. I suspect the key to this puzzle is that *s + *Herew -> *sreu- but *s + *reu- -> *streu-. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From stevegus at aye.net Tue Oct 3 03:25:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:25:37 -0400 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: > 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. My own idiolect of English may contain such a phantom phoneme. 'Whiter' is to my ear distinguishable from 'wider,' because the diphthong of the stressed syllable, ordinarily conceived of as /ai/, differs in quality. Like most North Americans, I have intervocalic /t/ > /d/, in both words. But the unvoiced /t/ of "whiter" shortens the first element of the diphthong to something approaching schwa, where "wider" is immune because it always had a voiced consonant; so they come out /w#ider/ and /waider/, respectively. -- Dantur opes nullis nunc, nisi divitibus. --- Martial From edsel at glo.be Tue Oct 3 11:00:04 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 13:00:04 +0200 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 1:51 PM [snip]. ... > 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 modern 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. [Ed Selleslagh] Just a remark concerning this example only: In Wallonia, the French speaking south of Belgium, local people, especially in the regions where the Walloon 'dialect' (actually a separate language, vaguely similar to French but with lots of different words and phonetics) is still spoken, still aspirate the 'h-aspir?' very much (in particular within words, like the name of the village of Jalhay) like in Dutch or German. Maybe this is a lingering old influence from Germanic in Normandy (Scandinavian) and Wallonia (Frankish). In Belgian French the distinction between 'je donnai' and 'je donnais' is usually quite clear: the first one is often pronounced as if it ended in 'e-accent aigu'. But on French radio and TV you hear more and more e.g. 'donnerai' and 'donnerais' being pronounced identically. So I wonder about the direction of the evolution. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 03:20:28 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 22:20:28 -0500 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- > From: Stanley Friesen > Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 6:54 PM [ moderator snip ] [SF] > 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)! [PR] I do think a case *might* be made in this case for derivational processes as a kind of inflection but I will not quibble since I do think that derivation is a more appropriate term for what is happening in 'sooth->soothe'. Now, the question is, do you consider IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or derivational? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Oct 3 04:32:24 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:32:24 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- > From: Dr. John E. McLaughlin > Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 4:05 AM > 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. [PR] This may well be true but I have a question in connection with it. When I pronounce a word like /tith/, the primary difference between it and /tidh/ seems to me to be that the voicing of the /dh/ requires a voiced onset; even more sensibly when stops are involved: /bat/ vs. /ba(uh)d/. This is particularly clear when an initial voiced stop is compared with a voiceless stop: /(uh)damp/ vs. /tamp/. So, I am wondering if /tidh/ may not have about the same length /i/ as /tith/ but with the onset somehow being reckoned as part of the 'length' in /ti(u)dh/? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Oct 3 05:11:12 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:11:12 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <20000426082023.29305.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Wow, this debate happened so long ago that I can hardly remember it. I'm so glad were back on-line. Thanks Mr. Moderator. Gabor Sandi wrote (in a long post on the phonemic or not distinction of English /th/ and /dh/): > 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. Comanche always reanalyzes English loans with initial /v/, /f/ or /b/ with an initial /p/. Thus, Comanche paisee' 'five cents', paare' /paate'/ 'barley', piic /piitsi/ 'beets' (can't find an example of E /v/ -> C /p/ right now, but I've seen it before, just can't remember which word list I saw it in). John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Oct 3 19:55:24 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 13:55:24 -0600 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <2000Apr25.013623@AN3039.spb.edu> Message-ID: In general I agree with Nikolaev's posting. If we look at the IE sound-system, what is missing (if we have no particular predilection for exotica) is fricatives. And for fricatives, esp. voiced, to intergrade (over time) with vowels or semi-vowels is hardly unknown. One may cite Greek /autos/ -> /aftos/, or OE palatal /g/ -> /y/ (English value). And as I said long ago, there may well be a connection between the famous /b/-gap and the apparent voicing of H3, if this was sucked into the gap, so to speak. I think I will dig up my earlier (mercifully brief) writings on the subject and inflict them on the assemblage. DLW From sarima at friesen.net Wed Oct 4 05:41:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 22:41:40 -0700 Subject: Questions on Mallory & Adams Encyclopedia In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have been reading _The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture_ by Mallory and Adams, and I have some questions and thoughts. I will start with a simple one. In their archeological entries, do they use calibrated or "raw" radiocarbon dates? Others to follow. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Oct 4 05:36:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 22:36:04 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <017b01c02ce8$f86b72c0$9bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 10:20 PM 10/2/00 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >Now, the question is, do you consider IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or >derivational? I think enough cases exist where there is an o-form as a noun or adjective, and an e-form as a verbal root to at least suggest occasional derivational use of the distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Oct 4 07:22:37 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 01:22:37 -0600 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <01d101c02cf3$03713600$9bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [I wrote] >> 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. > [PR] > This may well be true but I have a question in connection with it. > When I pronounce a word like /tith/, the primary difference > between it and > /tidh/ seems to me to be that the voicing of the /dh/ > requires a voiced onset; > even more sensibly when stops are involved: /bat/ vs. /ba(uh)d/. > This is particularly clear when an initial voiced stop is > compared with a > voiceless stop: /(uh)damp/ vs. /tamp/. > So, I am wondering if /tidh/ may not have about the same > length /i/ as /tith/ > but with the onset somehow being reckoned as part of the > 'length' in /ti(u)dh/? Take it up with the phoneticians. They all agree that English vowels are measurably longer in front of voiced sounds than in front of voiceless ones. It's not the onset they're measuring. John McLaughlin From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Oct 4 11:32:20 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 12:32:20 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Max Wheeler writes: [on non-verbs in final edh] > Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? > These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. Not all of these work for me, but most of them do, and I can add the noun 'edh' (or 'eth'), another name for barred-d. > I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include "hath", "doth"), > and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in some dialects). Agreed, except that certain nouns in final theta can also be used as verbs. A common example is the verb 'pith', as in 'pith a frog' (in a biology lab). This is derived from the noun 'pith'. A second occurs, a little marginally, in the verb 'mouth off', which, in my experience, always has theta. A third is the peculiarly British use of 'bath' as a verb, as in 'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American English, and perhaps in all other varieties of English. A fourth is the verb 'sheath', which is now rather common as an alternative to the traditional 'sheathe'. An extremely marginal fifth, which strictly only qualifies here in non-rhotic accents, is the British use of 'earth' as a verb, as in 'earth the TV set' (= US 'ground the TV set'). As an aside, I have just noticed that OED2 cites the very obscure noun 'mouthing', meaning 'entrance to a mine', with theta only -- perhaps somewhat unexpectedly. Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with theta, in my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does anyone want to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From hwhatting at hotmail.com Wed Oct 4 16:03:10 2000 From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 16:03:10 CEST Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] >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. I would like to suggest another solution to the problem outlined above. I strongly agree with the opinion of Gabor Sandi, posted in this discussion, on that for establishing whether two sounds are phonemes or allophones, only phonetic conditioning of their distribution (as against, e.g., semantic conditioning - the fact that initial /dh/ is restricted to pronouns in English is no argument against its phoneme status, and that the /th/-/dh/ distinction serves to distinguish nouns and verbs is, in my eyes, a strong argument in favour of these being diffrerent phonemes) ought to serve as a basis. The same also ought to apply to establishing phonemes: we should not establish a phoneme solely on the basis of one phone triggering the use of different forms of affixes. Let4s consider the case of the French article first: The rule is that various French words and morphemes have different forms depending on whether they are followed by a word beginning with a vowel or with a consonant (there are additional syntactical conditions for the choice between these alloforms, but I think I can leave this aside here for simplicity4s sake). Now a group of words, synchronically beginning in a vowel, triggers the alloform used before consonant. (These are mostly non-Romance loanwords which historically began with an /h/ no longer pronounced.)To keep the rule neat, one could of course elevate the "h aspiri" to phoneme status and posit a consonant phoneme /=/ which phonetically is not distinct to Zero, but triggers the pre- consonant alloform of preceding words. But this would mean that we have two phonemes with exactly the same realisation! So wouldn4t it make more sense to say that the choices between the two alloforms are triggered partly by phonetic conditions, and partly bv non-phonetic ones (i.e., there is a class A of words beginning in vowels which triggers alloform 1, and a class B which triggers alloform 2). This may be not as neat, but if we start to establish phonemes out of phonetically non-distinct sounds just because they trigger the choice of different allophones, where to stop? Why not ascribe to French two phonemes /s1/ and /s2/, one of which triggers a change from "al" to "aux" in plural formation and the other one doesn4t? One can do so, of course, but I think this is mixing up description levels and leads to confusion, not clarity. I4m not acquainted with Numic, so what I say now is based on John McLaughlin4s posting in this discussion: "Here's some very basic data to show that /=/ hasa phonemic status.1) Start with these noun stems which are representative of the entire bodyof nominal stems: [waa] 'cedar', [pyjy] 'duck', and [tyhyja] 'deer'2) Now add the postposition /-pa/ 'on' to each of them: [waahpa] 'on thecedar', [pyjypa] 'on the duck', and [tyhyjava] 'on the deer'. Notice howthe phonetic realization is different for each of these (remember that eachof these words represents a class of nouns that operate exactly the sameway).3) Now add the postposition /-tu/ 'through' to each of them: [waahtu]'through the cedar', [pyjytu] 'through the duck', and [tyhyjaru] 'throughthe 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] 'havea 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 secondelement, but a feature of the stem that causes the initial consonant of thesecond element to be preaspirated, nonlenited, and lenited. Unlike thevoicing 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 thatthese "final features" are -C (an undifferentiated consonant that causesgemination 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 splitor when morphophonemic distinctions have ceased productivity or when anynumber of changes have finally and irreversibly taken place. Comanche is avery clear borderline case. The phonemic status of = (Shoshoni /n/) is notcompletely black or white." My impression is that Comanche is similar to the case of French "h aspiri" - historically distinct phonemes have merged into /0/, and so a rule for choosing allomorphs based on phonetic conditions has been replaced by a system of words belonging to three declensional classes, which are distinguished by which allomorphs they trigger. Of course, if there are cases where the phonemes -C- and -n- postulated by John McLaughlin are still visible synchronically in stem-final position(maybe before morphemes beginning in a vowel?), then one could take these as the basic stem forms and state the rules for choosing the allomorphs based on phonetical conditions. But then we probably would not need a phoneme /=/ (historically < C). Of course, a "phoneme" /=/ looks like a good shortcut, as it succinctly conveys information ("triggers the follwing set of allomorphs"), especially for a lexical entry. It4s comparable to dictionaries of French distinguishing "h aspiri" from "h muet" by asterisking it. But if we want to keep the levels of description distinct, and to keep synchronical descriptions separate from historical explanation, we should not postulate phonemes in order to formulate rules for the choice of allomorphs. Better to work with declensional classes, and then add a historical explanation of their origins. Best regards, Hans-Werner Hatting From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:22:10 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:22:10 +0100 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" Message-ID: > Latin `do, dare' ..and ..PIE {dheH1} It was strongly argued on this list a few years back that credo was a compound of *dheh1, not of *deh3. There is no reason why other compounds could not also be found in Latin. How -if at all - would compounds of *dheh1 differ in Latin from the outcome of compounds of *deh3? The initial cluster, being now medial, would appear as /d/, the reduplication in the perfect would be identical as -didi, the stem vowel in zero grade forms would be identically /a/ or after reduction /i/ (or /e/ before /r/). What would happen in the present singular? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:07:14 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:07:14 +0100 Subject: Pokorny's Dictionary Message-ID: >Does anyone know how to get a copy of Pokorny's Dictionary? Write or email directly to Francke Verlag, Tubingen (or Basel). You can use your search engine to find their website on the internet. I think it's about 420 DM. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 10:04:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:04:55 +0100 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE Message-ID: Dennis asks: > how come there > appear to be no *(s)r- roots? Pokorny lists (s)reigh "klettern" and ten other roots in #sr- Peter From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Wed Oct 4 17:07:45 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 12:07:45 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Going back to my original typological question, asked from perspective of a linguist who doesn't do Indo-European, it is precisely this set of fricatives that I find odd. They do, of course, line up by place of articulation with the palatalized velar, velar, and labiovelar stop series, which makes them seem a little more natural, but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even close. Why no labial? Herb Stahlke >>> pie at AN3039.spb.edu 04/24/00 05:38PM >>> 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). [ moderator snip ] Then /x', x, x^w/ is, finally, the one set, i prefer. [ moderator snip ] Best wishes, Alex Nikolaev From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Fri Oct 6 21:45:57 2000 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Moserator) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 14:45:57 -0700 Subject: brief intermission Message-ID: I will be away from my office for the next 10 days, so there will be no mailings from the Indo-European and Nostratic lists till I return. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From edsel at glo.be Thu Oct 5 07:11:27 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 09:11:27 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 1:32 PM [snip] > Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, > a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with theta, in > my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does anyone want > to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) [Ed Selleslagh] I won't claim this isn't fully English, or rather: has become so, but do remember it is originally Greek (from 'kathar?:', the pure one, f.nom.sg.); so the rule that Greek theta is always th in English might apply. Ed. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:19:12 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:19:12 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Larry said: > ...'bath' as a verb, as in > 'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American English, > and perhaps in all other varieties of English. It's also common in NZ-speak (which shows strong influence from both UK & USA) > Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, Often also with -th-, despite the dictionaries. (I have never heard it with -dh!) Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:09:06 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:09:06 +0100 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] Message-ID: IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or > >derivational? > o-form as a noun or adjective, > and an e-form as a verbal root Might it not begin as, say, a result of phonetic environment, but in later PIE be used for derivational purposes? This "grammaticalising" of an originally phonetically conditioned variant is known elsewhere in various languages. So the fact that it is used derivationally does not prove it began that way. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Oct 5 14:03:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 09:03:56 -0500 Subject: Further on "silent" phonemes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Am I missing something here? It seems that French aspir? is just a case of /h/ > glottal stop and that the /-s/ of was also glottalized /-s/ > /-S/ > ? /-h/ > /?/ > /0/ perhaps similarly to final <-t> as glottal stop in some varieties of US English compare nigh /nai/ vs. (US dialect) night /nai?/ >On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:51:55 GMT Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:33:20 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:33:20 +0100 Subject: origin of Latin "do, dare" Message-ID: > ...And this > pre-literary Italic would have to be pretty early, if I am not mistaken, > for the change to /f/ not to have occurred, Also because of the perfect form (unless this is influenced by dare). An original compound of *dheh1 could well have a reduplicated zero grade perfect which would appear in Latin as -didi < *ded-ai < *dedh-h2e + -i (cf the Greek tethe:ka with secondary suffix and different grade as always). A later compound of facio is far more likely to have (or could only have) the perfect in -feci. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Oct 4 15:41:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 16:41:03 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: On this subject it's perhaps worth adding that the deh3 root shows forms in Latin as if from a root *dew-, eg the subjunctives duim, duis etc. Gerhard Meiser ("Historicher Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache" 1998 section 122.3 ) says: An original aorist lies behind "duim "duis" etc. (from do: give) < *dow-i- with suffix -i-, derived from the aorist stem *dow- < *dewh (parallel form to the root *do:, PIE *deh3). The present is found in Faliscan douiat (= det, "let him give"). Is this further evidence of the rounding of h3? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Oct 5 14:26:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 15:26:59 +0100 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Why should the laryngeals line up with the allegedly three-fold velar series? Why not with the much more widely attested three-fold stop series (T, D, DH), whatever that was? Peter From jer at cphling.dk Thu Oct 5 14:42:44 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 16:42:44 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: > [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, > x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through > Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even > close. Why no labial? If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY close to Dutch. Jens E. Rasmussen From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Oct 5 23:37:15 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 18:37:15 -0500 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: Dear Alexander and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander S. Nikolaev" Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 5:36 PM [ moderator snip ] > 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") [PR] Would you mind saying who is proposing -*H3on as an archaic possessive suffix? And if there was such a possessive sufiix, would it not preferably mean 'riverine'? Pat From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Fri Oct 6 15:45:27 2000 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 17:45:27 +0200 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) Message-ID: Peter wrote : >Pokorny lists (s)reigh "klettern" and ten other roots in #sr- This is just the point I'm making : IE dictionaries such as Pokorny and Watkins list several *sC- roots (where C= stop or sonorant) which are ofter related to *sVC- roots with similar or identical 'meanings', e.g. *skei- 'cut'/*sek- 'cut'. But no *(s)r- roots appear in Watkins, even though he gives *sreu- 'flow, move' along with *rei- 'flow'. Given that in Watkin's dictionary, *sek- extensions such as *skei- are listed separately and described as extensions of *sek-', why isn't *sreu- given as an extension of *ser-? Regarding *(s)r- roots, only one *(s)r- root, (*(s)reigh- 'klettern') is listed in Pokorny, as Peter points out, but even this appears questionable, since the Larousse Dic. of IE roots lists 'klettern' as continuing *gel-, like Eng. 'climb' (<*gle-m-bh-). All very confusing and unsystematic for the general linguist wanting to come to terms with PIE root structure. Pat wrote : >I suspect the key to this puzzle is that *s + *Herew -> *sreu-. Now this (if I have understood it) is an interesting idea, which I have suspected for some time for reasons I won't go into here. If we postulate a pre-PIE root *(s)Hxer- 'flow, move' (where Hx = undetermined laryngeal), then would not this account economically for *ser- (Hx drop-out from the s- prefixed form of the root), *sreu- (zero grade extension of the s- prefixed form of the root after Hx drop-out), and *rei- (zero grade of (?)*Hxer- after Hx drop-out)? Might it not also account for *er- 'move' (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov) after Hx drop-out from the s- less form? I suppose much would depend on the relative chronology. Sorry if the specifics are not perfect, but can any evidence be adduced to support or reject the idea? Again, many thanks for your thoughts. Dennis. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Oct 7 00:03:26 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:03:26 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I am interested in finding articles that have been written on either of these two items as well as more general articles dealing with the folklore and customs associated with either concept. In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most welcome. If you wish, you can reply to this request off the list. Thank you, Roz Frank _________________________________________________________ Roslyn M. Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 fax: (319)-335-2990 email: roz-frank at uiowa.edu Institute of Basque Studies Guildhall University, London. http://ibs.lgu.ac.uk/ _________________________________________________________ From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Oct 7 03:22:05 2000 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 21:22:05 -0600 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00a701c02eda$78f14580$cc56073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, petegray wrote: > Why should the laryngeals line up with the allegedly three-fold velar > series? Why not with the much more widely attested three-fold stop series > (T, D, DH), whatever that was? Because of effects on vowel quality, or what some would call vowel place. We should note that there may well have been fewer perceptible effects than places. Velar and dental, and labial and labio-velar, might have had very similar effects. DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Oct 7 12:16:42 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2000 14:16:42 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens wrote: >On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, >> x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through >> Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even >> close. Why no labial? >If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or >most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call >it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY >close to Dutch. But not *that* close. In the north, we have /s/, /x/ and /h/, but no /G/. In the south, they have /z/, /s/, /G/, /x/ and /h/. Additionally, there's either /f/ or /v/ and /f/. [I'm not counting written as a fricative: it's a bilabial, labiodental or labialized labiodental approximant or stop, depending on dialect]. Interesting that you say "at least some (or most? or all?) of the time". I've been thinking along those lines myself. We distinguish the laryngeals by their vowel colouring and vocalic reflexes in Greek, mainly, but that doesn't mean that every laryngeal that gave /e/ in Greek must have come from the same unitary PIE laryngeal phoneme. In the case of *h1, I agree that some, or most of the time, we're dealing with /h/: (some) *h1('s) aspirate(s) a following or preceding stop, some *h1's give /h-/ in Armenian and Albanian. On the other hand, *h1 must sometimes have been a simple glottal stop /?/: I believe a root like *h1es- "to be" is more likely to have been /?es-/ than /hes-/ (I mean, maybe it was */hes-/, but I don't think it's likely that *all* roots beginning with *h1V- had /h/). As to *h3, I don't think /G/ is very likely. At least in late PIE, I think there were no voiced fricatives. Earlier voiced *z, as in the nom.sg. which lengthens the thematic vowel, later merged with *s, so it's very unlikely that *G, if it ever existed, did not merge with *x (*G is usually the first voiced fricative to go, cf. Dutch). Also, a voiced velar fricative does not explain the o-colouring, so we should at least have /Gw/, and that would be strange indeed, to have /Gw/ without /G/. My own proposal would be to split up *h3 into /xw/ (labialized *h2, aspirating, Hittite h-), /?w/ and /hw/ (labialized *h1, partially aspirating, Hittite 0-) [allowing Jens to withdraw his "vote for chaos"]. "Voicing" *h3 can then be from *Gw > *xw, if the traditional reconstruction of the stops holds, or from *?w if the glottalic theory is correct. A possible confirmation of either thesis might come if we could discover cases of voicing *h2 (< *G) or of voicing *h1 (< *?). Now if we have labialized laryngeals (*h3), we probably have palatalized ones too (*?y, *hy, *xy). The first two surely give *h1, the last one too (as phonetic [g]), judging by the *h3 ~ *h1 alternations in the dual endings, which I trace back to auslautend nominative *-(a)ku > *-xw > *-h3 and oblique *-(a)ki > *-xy > *-h1. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Sun Oct 8 09:05:32 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 11:05:32 +0200 Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" To: Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 4:42 PM Subject: Typology and the phonetics of laryngeals > On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: >> [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x, x^w/ is, as a fricative >> series, bizarre. I looked through Hockett's Manual of Phonology and >> couldn't find anything even close. Why no labial? > If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or > most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call > it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY > close to Dutch. > Jens E. Rasmussen [Ed Selleslagh] I don't want to be facetious, but you should mention that you refer to the classic and historic pronunciation of Dutch, still in use in the Brabant (mostly acheless though) and Limburg (i.e. Frankish) dialect areas in Flanders and southern Netherlands, as well as in official Flemish Dutch on TV etc. Within this context, you are note close to, but right ON the mark. Matters are more complicated because in the provinces of the Netherlands north of the great rivers (Schelde, Maas, Rhine), including Amsterdam, pronunciation has shifted considerably: /s/ has become slightly 'chuintante', /h/ is intact, and /gh/ has become DEVOICED in most positions and a lot more guttural as is the new /x/ (originally ach-laut) which is often hard to distinguish from the new /gh/. This evolution is fairly recent (much less than a century), at least in 'official' speech. [Devoicing is also frequent in other consonants, and /r/ has become relatively close to the American one. On the other hand, voiceless consonants are voiced in certain positions: 'universiteit' is pronounced /uniferzite at t/; the rules are reminescent of High German]. Apart from that, I suppose you only meant to mention pronunciation facts, not origin since e.g. many (most) initial /h/ (like in all Germanic) stem from /k/, not H1. Ed. From menno.forconi at libero.it Sun Oct 8 12:25:33 2000 From: menno.forconi at libero.it (Menno Forconi) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 14:25:33 +0200 Subject: R: Pokorny's Dictionary Message-ID: Pokorny, Julius Indogermanisches etymologisches W?rterbuch. Band I: Text / Band II: Vorrede des Verfassers, Register, Abk?rzungsverzeichnis Francke ? 1994 ? 3. Aufl. ? ISBN 3-7720-0947-6 2 Bde., IV, 1183; IV, 465 Seiten, geb. DM 420,-/?S 3276,-/SFr 420,- www.geist.de/francke/verlag-D.html ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 12:07 PM >> Does anyone know how to get a copy of Pokorny's Dictionary? > Write or email directly to Francke Verlag, Tubingen (or Basel). You can use > your search engine to find their website on the internet. I think it's > about 420 DM. > Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Oct 8 15:57:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 10:57:44 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: besides *sreu- "to flow" Watkins 1985 gives *srebh- "to suck, absorb" < ? *sreu- in the sense of "to (make) flow in" ? and also superficially resembles Arabic sh-r-b- "to drink" *srenk- "to snore", root of words for "snore, snout, etc." onomatopoeic?; < ? *sreu- "that which produces a flow, flowing" ? *sri:g- "cold" e.g. Latin fri:gus related to *reig- "to stretch out, i.e. rigid" ? [snip] >This is just the point I'm making : IE dictionaries such as Pokorny and >Watkins list several *sC- roots (where C= stop or sonorant) which are ofter >related to *sVC- roots with similar or identical 'meanings', e.g. *skei- >'cut'/*sek- 'cut'. But no *(s)r- roots appear in Watkins, even though he >gives *sreu- 'flow, move' along with *rei- 'flow'. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Oct 7 02:03:05 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:03:05 -0700 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 3 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: <00a501c02eda$774da7a0$cc56073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 03:09 PM 10/5/00 +0100, petegray wrote: >IE *e/o-Ablaut inflectional or > > >derivational? >> o-form as a noun or adjective, >> and an e-form as a verbal root >Might it not begin as, say, a result of phonetic environment, but in later >PIE be used for derivational purposes? This "grammaticalising" of an >originally phonetically conditioned variant is known elsewhere in various >languages. >So the fact that it is used derivationally does not prove it began that way. Of course not. The issue I am addressing is its status in PIE itself. Pre-PIE is a different issue. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Oct 8 15:49:03 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 16:49:03 +0100 Subject: minimal pairs Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: [LT] >> Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with edh, > Often also with -th-, despite the dictionaries. (I have never heard it > with -dh!) Very interesting. The word turns up so rarely that I simply don't know what pronunciation most people would use for it. But I had to read that Longfellow poem in high school, and I believe we were taught to pronounce 'smithy' with edh. But, for whatever reason, I've always pronounced it with edh, and I confess I didn't know that most of the world was using theta. Thanks for the correction. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:41:26 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:41:26 +0300 Subject: Further on minimal pairs 1 [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Apr 2000 Stefan Georg wrote: [Pat Ryan] >>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". Sorry Stefan, but this sounds like a non sequitur to me. The fact that words (or elements) that have different "meanings" can't be used in the same context is a limitation on homophones, but doesn't really affect other words with different meanings. In the sense that meaning is being used here (that different phonemes give rise to different meanings), meaning and function are not equivalent. Meaning as you are using it here means "meaning class," not "meaning." Words that have the same function but different meanings can be used in the same context: Bill hit John with a stick. Bill hit John with a rope. Bill hit John with a brick. It is homonyms that cannot have the same function or be used in the same context (you can't use quail [n.; a bird] and quail [v. 'to fall back', 'to give way'] in the same context, but that doesn't prove that they have different phonemes). In fact, even homonyms with the same function can have different meanings so long as each meaning requires a different context (or you are willing to put up with a lot of ambiguity). Consider the following: Suzie runs five miles every morning. Suzie runs the office. Suzie runs for Mayor every year. Suzie runs off to Boston every weekend. Suzie's car runs well. Suzie's mascara runs when she cries. Suzie's toilet runs unless she jiggles the handle. Suzie's tongue runs away with her when she has a couple of drinks. In each of these uses of the verb 'run' the context compels the selection of a distinctly different meaning. The fact that these elements have different meanings does not prove that they have different phonemes. It is not true that words that have different meanings must have different phonemes. Phonemes can cause differences in meaning, but differences in meaning don't cause phonemes. If they did then homonyms would have to have invisible (inaudible?) phonemes that account for the differences in meaning. Phonemes are not units of meaning. Phonemes are semantically empty. If a phoneme is not semantically empty, then it isn't (just) a phoneme any more; it's a morpheme. And different phonemes do not necessarily create a difference in function. For example: John ate a fig. John ate a pig. Now there is no doubt that /f/ and /p/ are different phonemes in English but these two words have the same function and can be used in the same context (or "frame" if you like) although they have different "meanings" (in the senses that we are talking about). So it is rather the other way around. Words with different functions can have the same phonemes (hence we have homonyms). It is words with the same function but different meanings that can't have the same phonemes (otherwise you have ambiguity). English has ways of distinguishing in writing words that have come to have the same the same phonemes, but not in speech. This is what makes English such a marvelous punning language. Take for example the phonemically identical 'night' and 'knight' which have the same function (noun). This makes controlled ambiguity (double entendre) possible ("once a king, always a king, but once a knight is enough"). So the fact that 'sooth' and 'soothe' have different functions (and even different meanings) does not prove anything about whether [dh] is a phoneme in English or not since words with different meanings and functions can have the same phonemes ('quail [n.]' and 'quail' [v.]) and words with the same function can have different phonemes ('fig', 'pig') or the same phonemes ('knight', 'night'). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:46:47 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:46:47 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Apr 2000 Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[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. And you really must distinguish between productive rules and other rules. "The" productive rule is the one that is used to create new forms in the language. It is the default rule when a form is not marked for some other rule. Other rules are exceptions to the productive rule. These are markedness rules because forms that follow them have to be marked in the lexicon. Speakers of a language learn the markedness rules when they learn the language. There must be synchronic rules that produce these forms or else they wouldn't exist. The synchronic rules aren't the same as the diachronic rules that originally produced the forms, but they have the same result. They have to, because the basis of both historical grammar and synchronic grammar is the same: the language as it is presently spoken. But modern speakers don't know that this is an umlaut rule (most modern speakers don't even know what umlaut is); they just know it as a rule that six words in the lexicon are marked for. If they didn't know the rule, the plural of 'foot' would be 'foots' and the plural of 'tooth' would be 'tooths'. Linguists tend to use "productive" in two senses with respect to rules. "The" productive rule is the default rule that is used to produce new forms in the language. "A" productive rule is one that the speakers of the language know and use to generate some forms. So a rule may not be "the" productive rule but may still be "a" productive rule in the sense that speakers use it to produce forms currently used in the language. A non-productive rule is one that is no longer used at all in the language. An example of a non-productive rule in English is the use of '-(e)st' to form second person singular verb forms. There are no second person verb forms in '-(e)st' (like 'goest' or 'didst') in modern English because this rule is now non-productive. There are, however, noun/verb pairs like grass/graze, house/house, half/halve/, breath/breathe, bath/bathe, etc. This indicates that there is a productive morphophonemic rule that generates these forms. If there were no productive rule that creates these forms, then the forms wouldn't exist synchronically. The verb would be the same as the noun following "the" productive rule. If you are trying to tell me that rules that aren't "the" productive rule aren't known by native speakers then you are trying to tell me that there aren't any strong verbs in English because the rules that produced them are no longer productive, I just don't believe it. You may go around saying things like "I seed it with my own eyes" or "I have always thinked so," but most of the native speakers I know do not. If you think that synchronic grammar consists of only "the" productive rules, then you have a very idiosyncratic view of synchronic grammar. Synchronic grammar consists of both "the" productive (default) rules and other productive (markedness) rules. The markedness rules generate exceptions to "the" productive rules. >Therefore they are NOT synchronic morphophonemic variants. Sure they are. Any time you have a systematic phonological change that results in a systematic morphological change you have morphophonemic variation. The fact that modern speakers don't know that it is a morphophonemic change doesn't alter the linguistic fact. Again, most modern speakers don't know what morphophonemics is. There are two basic types of morphophonemic alternation. One occurs when a single morpheme has different phonological shapes depending on its environment. An example is the English plural morpheme '-(e)s' which is either voiced or voiceless depending on its phonological environment. Another example is the variation of the determiner 'a/an' depending on its phonetic environement. The other type of morphophonemic variation occurs when a regular phonological change causes a regular morphological change. Such changes often result in a change in grammatical meaning but not in lexical meaning or move the word from one functional category to another without significantly changing its underlying meaning. You have this exactly backwards. They *are* synchronic morphophonemic variants. They are not archaic morphophonemic variants. The process that created them was not morphophonemic in nature. It was a simple phonological change. It was triggered by a phonological environment that had no regard for meaning. But the synchronic rule that maintains these forms in the language is morphophonemic because the environment that triggers these changes is now morphological rather than phonological. Phonemes are units of sound. Morphemes are units of meaning. When a specific and predictable change in a sound causes a specific and predictable change in meaning, or when a morpheme has more than one phonetic realization on a predictable basis, then you have morphophonemics. >[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. Yes, this last statement is true (even if the first one isn't :>). It is a matter of timing. Since vowels are voiced, making a voiceless consonant sound following a vowel involves turning voicing off *before* beginning the consonant sound, creating a clear boundary between the vowel and the unvoiced consonant. Voiced sounds do not turn off voicing so there is no clear boundary between the vowel and the consonant. As a result the vowel sounds longer (and can be measured to be longer) because it continues into the beginning of the consonant. But I wouldn't call this lengthening (at least, not with respect to English), I would call it prolongation (a trivial-seeming point, but it avoids misunderstandings). >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. No, I can see that you aren't now; it was your use of "lengthening" that misled me. But you are the one who seems to be having problems separating out the diachronic and synchronic processes that produce these forms. I do not believe that the processes that originally produced these forms are still operating in modern English. The original creation of these forms was not morphophonemic. It was a simple sound change. English once had no voiced spirants. It had only unvoiced /th/, /f/, and /s/ (Proto-Germanic *z merged with *r in pre-English). Then a phonetic change took place that can be expressed by the rule [unvoiced spirant] > [voiced spirant] / [voice]___[voice]. There are other factors that may affect the change, such as the location of the stress, but note that this change is entirely phonological: the conditioning environment is phonetic and it affects all sounds in that environment regardless of meaning. This change caused the voicing of spirants in plural forms and verbal infinitives, not because of meaning, but because these forms, as they were at the time of the change, provided the required environment for the change to take place. This change did not create any new contrasts (phonemes). All it did was create voiced allophones of the original phonemes: /th/ [th, dh], /f/ [f, v], /s/ [s, z]. The forms of the plural and the infinitive also provided environments for a number of other changes (rules) to take place (although not at the same time) such as partial assimlation of vowels (umlaut) and lengthening of short vowels in open syllables. All in all, quite a number of rules pile up on these forms. Then other rules cause the forms to change, eliminating the conditioning environment that brought about these changes. However, the unvoiced/voiced distinction in spirants was kept in plurals (now formed with '-s') and noun/verb pairs. The new rule looks like this: [final unvoiced spirant] --> [voiced spirant] / [PLURAL, VERB]. Note that the phonetic environment has been replaced with a grammatical one. The change is no longer predictable phonologically. But it is still predictable. It is only when the change is used outside this enviroment that it is no longer predictable (in view of one of your previous posts, note that [POSSESSIVE] is not part of the environment; thus the distinction of paths/path's is not phonemic [phonetic, yes; phonemic, no] since the [dhz] of 'paths' is predictable by rule as is the [ths] of 'path's'). But the modern synchronic rule (as stated above) is morphophonemic and, of course, it is not "the" productive rule. The productive rule is NOUN --> VERB / ... (meaning that any noun can be used as a verb). But if you believe that the modern language doesn't have a rule that makes 'teethe' the verb from 'tooth', just start asking people if their baby is toothing and see what kind of reactions you get. Or if you believe that there is no modern rule that makes 'thieves' and 'halves' the plural of 'thief' and 'half', then you can use plurals like 'thiefs' and 'halfs'. People will probably understand you, because you are using "the" productive rule, but they will also probably wonder what your native language is. >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. Yes I agree that the /i:/ of 'teethe' can be expected to be more protracted than that of 'teeth' because of the voicing of the final consonant. But in my view, it is protracted even beyond what one would expect based on similar pairs (like 'safe', 'save' or 'staple', 'stable') leading me to believe that there is additional stress on the form. One notes a similarity in words such as 'writer' /rait at r/ and 'rider' /rai:d at r/ (where : implies additional vowel quantity). In dialects where /t/ and /d/ have merged into a dental flap, this additional vowel quantity is now the phonemic difference (/raiFLAP at r/, /rai:FLAP at r/). Since this kind of distinction is not normally phonemic in English, there may have been a rephonemicization ([shortness]+FLAP ~ /*t/ and [longness]+FLAP ~ /*d/). [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". Golly, one word is "way too many." :) But here is the tricky bit about 'ether': This word was already in Middle English (first attested in the 14th century according to my dictionary). This is before any possiblity of a phoneme split between [th] and [dh]. At this stage, [th] and [dh] were clearly still allophones because the original conditioning environment that caused the sound change had not yet fully disappeared. In this situation, 'ether', with its intervocalic [th] would have stuck out a mile as a foreign word. And 'either' didn't get its present phonological shape until after the Great Vowel Shift, so there was no need to distinguish 'ether' from 'either' originally. Even after the Great Vowel Shift, [th] and [dh] were still not phonemically distinct so there is no way to claim that 'ether' and 'either' were originally differentiated by different phonemes. So you are trying to tell me that when [th] and [dh] allegedly split into two phonemes, the difference between 'ether' and 'either' suddenly became a phonemic distinction. My question then is, how were they distinguished during the centuries before this split took place? My answer would be that /th/ had two allophones, [th] and [dh]; intervocalically the rule was that /th/ was realized as [dh] in native words and as [th] in non-native words that had [th] in this position. Since this rule still operates today, it is hard to see how the sole example where its operation creates a minimal distinction can be considered as evidence of the phonemicity of the segements involved. >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'? You are quite correct that "nativization" is in the perception of the speakers. But all the words you list were already present in Old English (and I'm not so sure about 'seal' [the animal], 'herring', and 'sea' being loans; you'd do better with 'egg', 'cup', and 'rose'), and as you say, have been completely Anglicized. And there is not an intervocalic [th] in the lot. To check on perceptions of "borrowed" vs. "native", let's look at three borrowings of the same root from the Latin-French continuum. If we consider 'cant', 'chant', and 'chanson' we will see that these three words came into English at various stages of Latin-French phonological development as indicated by the pronunciation of the initial consonant. 'Cant' and 'chant' are fully Anglicized and probably would not be recognized as loans by naive native speakers. But 'chanson' has been in the language for about 400 years and it still has its French pronunciation. It simply resists Anglicization because it is not known to most naive native speakers. People who know this word are likely to know that it has a French pronunciation and to know why. >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. This latter process is what Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396, calls "nativization by adoption" which he characterizes as "downright adoption of the foreign segment or ... adoption of the segment in a context in which it does not occur natively." Let me quote what he has to say in summary on pp. 396-97: The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively different from the other nativization processes: It does not really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into the language without losing track of the fact that they are and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. Hock goes on to point out that the second thing that the Old Irish example shows is that once a word is accepted as native, then it is treated exactly like a native word. Now while a thousand years is surely enough time for nativization to take place, most of the words that I am talking about have been in English far less than that. Surviving words that were already in OE are surely considered native. Even words like 'sky' and 'skirt' are doubtless considered native despite the fact that the initial [sk] tells a linguist that they are loans from Old Norse and despite the fact that 'skirt' has a native doublet, 'shirt'. >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. The same is of course true of '-ize' and '-ism', but despite the fact that they are fully productive suffixes in English, most speakers probably still perceive them as foreign. In its borrowings, English is omnivorous. It will use foreign suffixes with native stems and foreign stems with native suffixes, perhaps knowing that they are foreign, but not really caring. All in all, the likelihood that borrowed words will be considered native depends on a number of factors, which include (but are not necessarily limited to): 1) The length of time that the word has been in the language: words that were borrowed already in OE like 'cup', 'rose', 'street' are likely to be considered native because they have undergone most of the same phonetic changes that native words have. 2) How well the words resemble native words: words like 'candle' or 'castle' are likely to be considered native because of their resemblance to native words like 'handle' or 'wrestle'. On the other hand, words like 'chandelier' or 'ch?teau', which were borrowed from the same roots but at a much later date, are almost certain to be considered foreign because of their un-English phonology and morphology. Likewise, 'chief' is likely to be considered native because of its resemblance to native 'thief', while 'chef', borrowed from the same root but about 500 years later will probably be considered foreign. Similarly, 'file' (a collection of papers) is likely to be considered native because it is homonymous with the native 'file' (the tool). No connection is likely to be seen between the borrowed 'file' and 'filament', which may or may not be considered a loan. 'Arms' (weapons) and 'army' are likely to be considered native because of their similarity to the native 'arm', while the native word for "army," 'here', has disappeared from the language with only a few traces. Indeed, were the good (Old) English word 'heretoga', "war leader," to be revived, most people would doubtless consider it foreign (unless they recognize it through the German cognate 'Herzog'). 3) Short words (particularly those that match English phonotactics) are more likely to be considered native than long words. Thus 'air' or 'sky' is likely to be considered native, while 'atmosphere' would doubtless be considered foreign. 4) In general, words borrowed from languages that are closely cognate with English (such as other Germanic languages) are more likely to be considered native than words borrowed from more distantly related or unrelated languages. Thus 'egg', 'fir', and 'skin' are likely to be considered native while 'khaki', 'pajamas/pyjamas', and 'etiolate' are likely to be considered foreign. 5) Common, frequently used words are more likely to be considered native than rare words (however valid or false this perception may be). 6) Words that flat out violate English phonotactics in a fairly spectacular fashion, like 'aardvark', 'zygote', 'syzygy', or 'quincunx' are likely to always be considered foreign (or at least non-native) no matter how long they stay in the language. Loans with intervocalic [th] may very well belong to this category (although this is not a particularly spectacular violation). >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. It's hardly an artificial distinction. The distinction is disgustingly regular. And the vast majority of these words are not "ancient" borrowings but occurred after the change took place. Words that were in the language before the change took place (like 'rose') underwent the change. >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, For the (next to) last time, John, the change that created these forms was not morphophonemic. There is a productive modern English rule that creates these forms for modern speakers or else the forms wouldn't be there. The synchronic rule is not the same one that created the forms. >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. Sure they have split, possibly even into two phonemes. There is no reason why [th] and [dh] shouldn't or couldn't be separate phonemes in English. They just aren't used as separate phonemes; that is as markers of *arbitrary* distinctions in meaning. Show me an example where the difference can't be accounted for by a fully generalized rule and I'll believe it. But you are also forgetting about the evidence of loan words from languages that do have a /dh/ phoneme where this phoneme doesn't get taken into English as [dh] (e.g., 'dhow' [from Arabic] or 'dharma' [from Hindi]). If [dh] is really a phoneme in English, then there is no reason why these words shouldn't come into English with that phoneme. After all, foreign words with [v] or [z] come into English with /v/ or /z/. So why shouldn't foreign words with [dh] come into English with /*dh/? >[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. Perhaps, but it looks like the trap was dug by the Numicists themselves rather than being there in the language. >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. >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). There is a similar phenomenon in Finnish, known as gemination (sometimes referred to as the "phantom consonant"). Certain forms of certain types of verbs and certain forms of certain types of nouns trigger gemination of the initial consonant of the following word (e.g., "come here" is realized as 'tulet t?nne'). This event is both phonologically (always comes after [e]) and morphologically (only certain forms that meet the phonological criterion trigger it) conditioned. It usually doesn't get a very detailed or coherent discussion in grammars, but I have never seen anyone try to explain it by a stem-final silent phoneme. Perhaps Ante Aikio can help me out on this one. >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]. Yes, I agree. >(Now's the part where we disagree.) Again, I agree. >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. I can't see why. These are simply morphophonemic alternations. Such alternations with different stem types are normally treated as variant declensions based on noun classes. If you want to call these variants morphophonemes, but not phonemes, I would have no objection. >Because of the completely non-productive nature of the old >morphophonemic processes which gave rise to [th] versus [dh], For the last time, John, the processes that gave rise to [th] and [dh] were not morphophonemic. It is the modern synchronic rules that are morphophonemic. And they are productive because if they weren't, the forms wouldn't be in the language. >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. We can set them up, but we can't get speakers to use them. Until speakers use them as phonemes we can't say that they exist as phonemes. The potential for their use as phonemes exists, and they are probably on the verge of being used as phonemes (for example, 'bath' has both forms of the plural [baths] and [badhz]; if these two forms come to have distinct meanings {such as [badhz] denoting an immersion in water ('the children have all had their baths[dhz]') and [baths] referring to a place where one can be immersed in water ('we visited the baths[ths] of Caracalla yesterday')}) then this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as these forms remain in free variation, there is no phonemic distinction. >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'm sorry, John. I didn't mean to get your goat, and now that I have it I don't know what to do with it. But since your perception of what I said (as indicated by your paraphrase) and what I actually said ("Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair") have little relation to one another, I don't consider that it is my fault. I see a vast difference between "No one doubts ..." and "Most people would not insist on ...". So you can have your goat back with my compliments. But if you contintue to react to your perceptions of what is said rather than what is actually said, then I predict that your goat will continue to go walkabout with disturbing regularity. I suggest that you keep it on a shorter tether. :) >I doubt it, and quite seriously. I doubt it, too. I just want to see some evidence that makes it unequivocal. Everything that I have found that *could* be taken as evidence for [th] and [dh] being used as separate phonemes can be convincingly explained otherwise. I think it is something that is in the process of happening and therefore hard to pin down. It is rather like the change in the meaning of 'fulsome' that is currently taking place. While both meanings are in use, there is the danger of ambiguity. >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. :) Hear, hear. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:53:43 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:53:43 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: [Ross Clark] >>> 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. First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second point, I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how language works linguistically (some areas are easier than others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say what goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it would certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we can get at is the language that speakers produce. Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely to get there. >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? Let me answer this from back to front. You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it produces a nice phonological generalization. This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. What more can one ask of a theory (or hypothesis or law) than that it account for the observed data in a consistent and concise manner and that it provide a reliable generalization? Nothing, really, except, of course, that it have a test for falsification. But you can't say that things that native speakers are unaware of can't affect phonology or phonemic analysis. Most native speakers are unaware in any conscious way of what phonemes are. They may use them in every utterance they make, but they can't tell you what they are (actually, linguists have a pretty hard time telling you what they are :>). If you ask a native speaker what the phonemes of his language are, he won't be able to tell you. Determination of phonemes can only be done by recording unselfconscious speech and seeing, from linguistic analysis, what the phonemes are. And different analysts may arrive at different phonemic analyses. So whether native speakers are aware of the reasons for the way they use their language or not is irrelevant to its analysis. As for what evidence I have that native speakers are able to keep track of foreign words (although not necessarily specifically as "foreign" words), I have already quoted Hock 1986 elsewhere, but for the sake of overkill, I will quote it here again: The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively different from the other nativization processes: It does not really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into the language without losing track of the fact that they are and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396-97 This is only one person's opinion, but I don't doubt that similar statements could be found in other textbooks of historical linguistics, so I will consider it as evidence that native speakers can recognize foreign words, if they have not been phonologically nativized, for a considerable time after they have entered the language, by their phonological peculiarities. If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized pronunciation of 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after it entered the language (first attested in 1601 according to my dictionary). But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the words as native or non-native. For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in English words. But first it is necessary to show that a pattern actually exists. If there is no pattern, which the theory relies on, then the theory is falsified. While the fact that the six typical English words that you offered as examples (pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur) are indeed all loan words is suggestive, it is not really sufficient. To see if there is a pattern, I have taken a lemmatized list of English words based on the British National Corpus (BNC) available on the web at http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html This list contains 6318 lemmata whose tokens have more than 800 occurrences in the BNC of over 6 million words. From this I have extracted lemmata with intervocalic . These were then marked as words that can reasonably be considered native (already in OE, [+n]) and as words that are non-native (came into the language in ME or later [-n]). I then determined the pronunciation of the segment ([th] or [dh]) using my dictionary. The data are arranged as follows: 1. rank of frequency (based on 2.) 2. total number of tokens of the lemma in the corpus 3. lemma 4. function 5. native/non-native 6. pronunciation of segment 7. any additional information 2558 3218 altogether adv [+n] [dh] 159 60182 another det [+n] [dh] 347 28321 anything pron [+n] [th] [+compound] 1413 6852 author n [-n] [th] 5647 968 authorise v [-n] [th] 303 31231 authority n [-n] [th] 2188 4048 bother v [??] [dh] 864 11757 brother n [+n] [dh] 3412 2072 cathedral n [-n] [th] 3630 1892 clothing n [+n] [dh] 656 15599 either adv [+n] [dh] 840 12167 either det [+n] [dh] 5143 1134 ethical a [-n] [th] 6050 857 ethics n [-n] [th] 436 23216 father n [+n] [dh] 5302 1075 feather n [+n] [dh] 1859 4986 gather v [+n] [dh] 5096 1149 gathering n [+n] [dh] 5008 1184 gothic a [-n] [th] 4135 1568 hitherto adv [+n] [dh] 3230 2264 hypothesis n [-n] [th] 2939 2625 leather n [+n] [dh] 6128 841 marathon n [-n] [th] 4823 1248 mathematical a [-n] [th] 3517 1969 mathematics n [-n] [th] 575 18044 method n [-n] [th] 5396 1041 methodology n [-n] [th] 354 27784 mother n [+n] [dh] 1798 5227 neither adv [+n] [dh] 2687 3018 neither det [+n] [dh] 277 34064 nothing pron [+n] [th] [+compound] 75 135185 other a [+n] [dh] 264 35164 other n [+n] [dh] 685 14959 other pron [+n] [dh] 1150 8798 otherwise adv [+n] [dh] 219 42341 rather adv [+n] [dh] 1988 4553 southern a [+n] [dh] 4330 1473 sympathetic a [-n] [th] 3113 2377 sympathy n [-n] [th] 309 30960 together adv [+n] [dh] 1623 5873 weather n [+n] [dh] 260 36169 whether conj [+n] [dh] 4875 1232 within adv [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] 207 45042 within prep [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] 204 45867 without prep [+n] [dh] [th] [+compound] The list contains only 45 words and many of these are phonologically identical with functional differences or are derivations from the same root. The pattern presented by these 45 words, however, is overwhelmingly consistent. Of the native words, five have a [th] pronunciation, and these are all transparent compounds where the occurs at a morpheme boundary (moreover, three of these five can have either pronunciation); the rest have the [dh] pronunciation. Of the non-native words, *all* have the [th] pronunciation. As far as I can see, there are no close calls on native vs. non-native. The only word whose origin is questionable is 'bother'. One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 lemmata with intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native (and 5 of these are clearly derivative). You say that there are hundreds of these words in the language (and so there are, if not thousands). This makes one point quite clear. While there may be quite a large number of loan words in English, the core vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences in a corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you eliminate derivatives) of these lemmata. This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the lemmata with intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. The larger one's vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as an absolute, but as a percentage of the total) one is likely to know. Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level. Hence by the time that one has acquired a large number of such lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated to realize that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor often consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. Thus my test of the pronunciation of these words may not be entirely accurate, since I am relying on my own pronunciation and on the pronunciation given by the dictionary. As a turnabout, if you have evidence that native speakers regularly mispronounce these words because they don't know that they are loans, that would be germane. The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must be created by its speakers because that is the only place that language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then it is simple coincidence. If it can be shown that the pattern created by intervocalic [th] in loan words and intervocalic [dh] in native words is below the level of coincidence then the theory is falsified. Even without applying any statistical tests to the pattern, I think coincidence can be ruled out. Now if there were no pattern, then intervocalic [th] and [dh] should appear scattered through the lexicon in a random fashion. As a percentage of the total, the number of [th]'s and [dh]'s should be about the same in both loans and native words. In this case, [th] and [dh] would be phonemically distinct because there would be no way to predict which one would occur in a voiced environment. However, the fact that *all* the loans have [th] suggests that this is not coincidence. As more and more examples of intervocalic [th] in English are investigated, I believe that the pattern will become overwhelmingly clear, far beyond the limits of coincidence. Intervocalic [th] will appear regularly in loan words, principally classical neologisms or borrowings from French; intervocalic [dh] will appear in native words. There will be intervocalic [th] in some native words, but these will form patterns of their own, occurring in words where the sound change rule did not operate or where [th] has been restored through analogy. There will also be a significant number of native words where either [th] or [dh] can appear as free variants. Thus far, I think I have shown that there is a pattern of intervocalic [th] in non-native words and intervocalic [dh] in native words, and that this pattern is not likely to be the result of coincidence. You said above that 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, ... You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact that words in English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly loan words because the speakers of the language are unaware that these are loans. As I mentioned above, this is not just a weak argument, it is a spurious one. It may be true that most speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is irrelevant to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then most linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic mechanisms of their language. What native speakers know is how to use their language, not how it works. Now it is quite possible to be able to use a system without knowing in detail how that system works. Think about it the next time you switch on your computer or your TV set or get in your car and drive off. With all these systems you may know what actions on your part cause the system to do certain things, but chances are that you don't know why the system reacts that way or how it accomplishes that reaction. So it is with native speakers of a language. The fact that naive native speakers know how to use their language but don't know how it works has two natural side-effects: (1) Naive native speakers are not a reliable source of grammatical information about their language. If asked if something is grammatically correct (acceptable usage), they will be able to say "yes" or "no" or "it depends"; but if asked why something is or is not grammatically correct, the response is likely to be "I don't know, it just is." (2) It is possible for a foreigner who has studied the language linguistically to know more about how the language works than a naive native speaker does, while still not being able to speak the language like a native speaker. What is important about all this is to keep in mind that it is possible to use some system even if one does not know in detail how it works, and that it is possible to know how a system works without being able to use it. It is even possible to talk about how a system works if the casual user of the system doesn't know what you are talking about. Admittedly, cars and TVs and computers are different from language. The former are designed by human beings who know exactly how they work. They are designed to be used by people who don't know how they work. Often the people who design them don't even want the user to know how they work. With language, nobody really knows how it works. Users can use it and linguists have studied many aspects of it to find out how it works, but basically, linguists don't generally try to tell users how language works. They (the linguists) are too busy studying yet more aspects of language in yet more detail and trying to reach agreement on how it works. And the users, for the most part, don't care how language works. Grammar (in the sense of prescriptive rules) is something that they have to study in school. When they don't have to study it, they forget it quickly. I think the attitude to grammar of most native speakers can be summed up by paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from _The Magnificent Seven_: "Grammar? -- We don't need no steenking grammar!" If speakers of a language really, passionately, want to know how their language works, then they become linguists. You are trying to maintain that it is not possible to discuss language in linguistic terms if naive native speakers do not realize that the linguistic terms exist or what they mean. More simply you maintain that linguistic descriptions of the functioning of a language cannot be based on distinctions that naive native speakers are unaware of. As a reductio ad absurdum, this would mean that 'feet' cannot possibly be the plural of 'foot' because the naive native speaker does not know what umlaut is. The different vowels in 'foot' and 'feet' cannot be morphophonemic alternation because the naive native speaker does not know what morphophonemics is. The different pronunciation of intervocalic [th] and [dh] cannot be attributed to a difference between foreign and native words because naive native speakers do not know the difference between foreign words and native words (truly naive native speakers do not even know that there are foreign words or, indeed, that there are other languages than their own). So there is a synchronic rule in English that makes 'feet' the plural of 'foot'. There has to be such a rule because otherwise the plural of 'foot' would be 'foots'. The fact that the native speaker is unaware of the historical reason for this rule is irrelevant. How, then, is it possible for linguists to know more about how language works than native speakers do? The answer is, of course, that linguists make it their business to know how language works. They study various languages to find out what is common to them in an effort to discover how language works. Native speakers do not know (and most of the time, they don't care) how language works; they only know how to use a language (note the distinction between "language" and "a language") and they can't explain how they know this. Knowing how to use a system is not the same thing as knowing how the system works. Part of the answer lies in the fact that linguists and native speakers come about their knowledge of language in different ways. Native speakers learn their language from hearing it and then imitating it, guessing at new forms by deduction, induction, and abduction. In doing so, they make a lot of mistakes. Often these mistakes are corrected at the time they are made, but sometimes they are self-corrected after further analysis or better imitation (and sometimes they are never corrected; this results in change [or at least variation] in the language). Children will often say 'foots' for 'feet'; when corrected, they will then often use 'feets' instead of 'feet' because, although they now know that the correct plural form is 'feet', they still want to apply the productive rule which adds /s/ to form the plural. So children learn the synchronic rules of grammar by trial and error. They don't learn rules like [+foreign] or [-native] (in fact, features like these are probably no longer used by linguists either, but are relics from my time in grad school; this doesn't really matter either, since, even though the terminology may have changed, the results will be the same). When faced with words like 'mother' and 'mathematics' they don't learn them as [+native] and [-native]; rather they learn them as [+voicing rule] and [-voicing rule]. In the normal way of things children don't learn the reasons for the rules or the reasons why the rules don't apply in some cases. They only learn them as [+rule] and [-rule] or sometimes as [+rule1] / environment1 and [+rule2] / environment2. It remains for a linguist to look at all the examples of [-voicing rule] and determine that the voicing rule operated at some time in the past and that any word that came into the language after this is not subject to it. Native speakers never learn this (unless they are really good at pattern recognition) and simply know that the voicing rule applies to some words and not to others. So even though the native speaker may not know that the reason for the rule that prevents voicing is based (for the most part) on [-native], he will still know that there is some rule that operates. He may refer to these words as "fancy words" or as "high-falutin' words" or as "book-learnin' words" but he will have some way of categorizing them. Furthermore, he will contrast them with "plain words" or "everyday words" or "words of one or two syllables" in a way that will remarkably parallel the linguistic idea of [+native] and [-native] (it won't match it exactly, because many loans, particularly short ones that match native English phonology will not be considered "fancy words"). We have already noted that there are a remarkable number of loan words in English, but that the core vocabulary, the most frequently used everyday words, remains Germanic. People who do not recognize Greek and Latin neologisms for what they are are not likely to have many of them in their vocabulary. Most of these words will fall into categories that such speakers will have little use for. Note also that mono- or bisyllabic loans from other Germanic or even Romance languages are much less likely to be recognized as loan words than polysyllabic words from Romance or Greek. Most speakers would not recognize 'sky' or 'air' as loan words (or consider them "fancy" words), whereas I feel confident that most speakers would recognize 'atmosphere' as a loan (neologism) word (or consider it a "fancy" word). Most native speakers would never doubt that 'curse' is a native (or a "plain") word, whereas 'anathema', if it is in the speaker's vocabulary, would surely be considered foreign (or "fancy"). And one reason that speakers will have for considering a word a "fancy" word is that it doesn't follow the same phonological rules that "plain" words do. I simply maintain that native speakers will make some kind of distinction between words like 'air' and 'atmosphere' or between 'curse' and 'anathema'. Of course this is getting dangerously close to looking like a circular argument: Speakers know that words belong to this category because they are pronounced differently and the words are pronounced differently because they belong to this category. But is not so circular as it may seem. At first the speaker may not know why (or even *that*) the words are pronounced differently. But as he collects more and more of them, they will eventually form a category (whatever he may call it) in his mind and he will know that any word that has this pronunciation anomaly is likely to belong to this category and that any word that he considers should belong to this category is likely to have the pronunciation anomaly. Rather than being circular, this is known as positive feedback. And in the long run, the words are not pronounced differently because they belong to this category; the rules for pronouncing these words are marked in the dictionary. It just turns out on analysis that words that are pronounced this way are overwhelmingly likely to belong to this category. Linguists know that there is likely to be a difference in the phonology of native words and foreign words. In fact many languages have a layer of phonology devoted to loan words. Linguists know this because they have checked this cross-linguistically. Native speakers don't usually get a chance to do this. For example, in recent borrowings in Finnish (within the past 200 years or so) consonant gradation does not take place (please don't ask me to explain consonant gradation :>). Thus 'automobile', 'of an automobile' (compare 'street' 'of a street') or 'mug', 'of a mug' (compare 'hill' 'of a hill'). Children learning the language, however, are unaware that these are loanwords, and unless or until they are corrected will use 'audon'. Once corrected, they will use 'auton' and the word will be marked [-consonant gradation]. Chances are that the speaker will never know why it is marked [-rule]. It is sufficient for his purposes that it is so marked. Some day a linguist may tell him that it is [-rule] because it is [-native] (or with enough education or experience he may figure it out for himself), but it won't make any difference to the way he uses the language. He doesn't need to know the reason for the rule, he just needs to know the rule. It just makes it easier for him if he can apply the rule to a category of words rather to each word individually. Once he finds out that one of these words that follow this rule is a recent loan, he is likely to consider that they all are. And so eventually he may generalize the rule so that any word that is perceived as a recent loan will be without consonant gradation and any word without consonant gradation will be considered a recent loan. So the pattern exists; its regularity makes it extremely unlikely to be coincidence. The pattern can be easily accounted for on historical grounds. The fact that synchronic grammar is unable to account for the pattern is not grounds for saying that the pattern does not exist or for saying that the pattern is not significant. Rather, it points to a deficiency in synchronic grammar, a blind spot where the rules that speakers use to create this pattern cannot be reconstructed. But synchronically the pattern must be generated by the speakers of the language; otherwise, it wouldn't be there. It can't be a phonemic distinction because it is predictable. To get to the heart of the matter, the real crux here is the difference between diachronic (historical) grammar and synchronic (descriptive) grammar. At various times it has been claimed that synchronic grammar liberates languages and linguistics from its historical shackles, that it makes historical linguistics obsolete, that it severs the connection between a language's history and the way it is used. But as time wears on, it has become obvious that there is really not all that much difference between synchronic grammar and historical linguistics. And especially that there is virtually no difference in the results of the two methods. When one stops to think about it, there can't be much difference between the results, because the results are the same: the modern language as it is presently spoken. In one case, the language is the result of the historical processes that produced it. In the other, it is the result of the processes that its native speakers use to produce it. But it is still the same language. So historical grammar and synchronic grammar simply focus on two different aspects of the same thing. And this should be a clue that they are in many ways complementary. Historical rules often make it easier (or even possible) to understand synchronic rules. But synchronic rules have to operate without reference to historical rules because the speakers of a language are, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the history of the grammar that they use. But synchronic rules and historical rules have to have the same result (even though, for practical reasons, one may be expressed in opposite terms from the other or many historical rules may be compressed into a single synchronic rule) because they both describe the same language. Furthermore, there are those, like Hjelmslev, who maintain that internal reconstruction using a single language can never be historical, because anything that can be extracted about the language in this way must be in the language synchronically. Therefore, if there are morphophonemic alternations in the language, there must be synchronic rules that produce them or else they wouldn't be there. Using features like [-native] to block certain rules is doubtless out of vogue as a synchronic reconstruction since it can be argued that native speakers can't tell the difference between native words and foreign words (and I would agree, in principle, that the average native speaker would be unaware of this distinction when stated this way), but there must be some feature that acts to block the voicing rules synchronically or else the unvoiced spirants wouldn't be there in such a predictable pattern. But I can't see that inventing dummy phonemes that block the operation of rules is an improvement. And I find it hard to say that the difference between intervocalic [th] and intervocalic [dh] is a phonemic distinction when all Greek and Latin loanwords or neologisms with intervocalic [th] have [th] in English and the only contrast that can be pointed out is between [i:th at r] (a Greek loanword) and [i:dh at r] (a native word). The pronunciation of [th] in 'ether' is required by rule (as indicated by an overwhelming pattern of occurrences even if the rule can't be formulated synchronically) and the pronunciation of [dh] in 'either' is required by rule (ditto). If the sounds that occur in these words is predictable by rule, then the distinction isn't phonemic. So the question becomes: Just how much *do* speakers know about their language? This is a question that is somehow tied up with that of how cognition and language processing work, and, to my knowledge, it doesn't have an answer as of now. But it should not be argued that linguistic descriptions of linguistic phenomena are invalid because native speakers are unaware of them. Historical grammar and synchronic grammar must have the same result because they both describe the same language. In this way, they are rather like the wave models and particle models in particle physics. While the bases of these models may be contradictory, they must ultimately be complementary because they both accurately describe different aspects of the same physical reality. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Oct 15 11:59:10 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:59:10 +0300 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 04 Oct 2000 Larry Trask wrote: >Max Wheeler writes: >[on non-verbs in final edh] >> Scythe? Lathe? Booth? Swathe? Tithe? Hythe (placename)? Blyth (placename)? >> These old words perhaps undermine the hypothesis. >Not all of these work for me, but most of them do, and I can add >the noun 'edh' (or 'eth'), another name for barred-d. There is also 'smooth' which forms an adjective/verb pair, both with final [dh]. Not all of these work for me either, principally 'booth', which I know only with final [th] (my dictionary says that final [dh] is "esp[ecially] Brit[ish]"). But scythe is quite regular, the OE form being 'si:the' and hence the is intervocalic and should have gone to [dh]. My pronunciation, however, is [sai] and hence is homophonous with 'sigh'. 'Lathe' has a counterpart with final [th] 'lath', but it is not at all sure that the two are related. Both are nouns and 'lathe' is usually considered a loan. Both also have unmarked correlate verbs, 'lath' "to provide with laths," and 'lathe' "to turn on a lathe." 'Swathe' (or 'swath') as a noun meaning "(like) a path cut with a scythe" is difficult because it is mixed up with an unrelated verb 'swathe' "to wrap, bind" (connected with 'swaddle'). 'Tithe' is a frozen form, originally the same as the ordinal number 'tenth' (OE 'te:otha' < 'teogotha'). Both verb and noun are the same and only with [dh]. I won't comment on the place names, but I will point out that the adjective 'blithe' has both pronunciations, with final [th] and with final [dh]. The pronunciation with [dh] is regular since the OE form was 'bli:the'. The adjective 'lithe' is similar in all respects. >> I believe all /-Vth/ words are non-verbs (unless you include >>"hath", "doth"), and nearly all are nouns (but for "with" in >>some dialects). An exception is 'quoth' "said" which is marginalized and has a defective paradigm. It is used only in the past tense, usually with only the first or third person, and regularly has VS word order ("Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'"). Unlike 'hath' or 'doth' the of 'quoth' is part of the root (< OE cwethan). It is not related to 'quote' which is a loan from Latin. It is, however, related to bequeath (or bequeathe), which can have either [th] or [dh]. The corresponding noun, 'bequest', is also irregular, having been influenced by 'quest' (a French loan). So the pattern is truly broken on this one. There are only a few /-Vth/ words that are not nouns: 'beneath', 'both', 'underneath', and, as pointed out, 'with'. 'Beneath' and 'underneath' are compounds, made up of 'be-' and 'under-' combined with 'neothan' "below." The latter element is related to 'nether'. >Agreed, except that certain nouns in final theta can also be >used as verbs. >A common example is the verb 'pith', as in 'pith a frog' (in a >biology lab). This is derived from the noun 'pith'. >A second occurs, a little marginally, in the verb 'mouth off', >which, in my experience, always has theta. There is also 'bad-mouth', which, however, my dictionary lists as either [th] or [dh]. In my experience, 'mouth off' can have either [th] or [dh] as well. My dictionary also records the verb 'mouth' as occurring with either [th] or [dh] although this is recording general 'mouth' with [dh] and 'mouth off' with [th] since it does not have a separate entry for 'mouth off'.. >A third is the peculiarly British use of 'bath' as a verb, as in >'bath the baby'. This, I believe, is unknown in American >English, and perhaps in all other varieties of English. >A fourth is the verb 'sheath', which is now rather common as an >alternative to the traditional 'sheathe'. >An extremely marginal fifth, which strictly only qualifies here >in non-rhotic accents, is the British use of 'earth' as a verb, >as in 'earth the TV set' (= US 'ground the TV set'). It is quite true that nouns in /-Vth/ can be used as verbs without any change. What we have here is the productive rule of verb formation (NOUN --> VERB / ...) coming into conflict with the markedness rule for verb formation (final spirant voicing rule). As John McLaughlin has gone to some pains to point out, "the" productive rule simply uses the noun as a verb without any modification. The marked noun/verb pairs (with final spirant voicing, which have all been in the language for a long time) are beginning to contrast with unmarked noun/verb pairs created by the productive rule. I suspect that the phonemicity of [th] and [dh] will manifest itself through the resolution of such conflicts. When the verb of the unmarked noun/verb pair and the verb of the marked noun/verb pair have distinct meanings and one always has only [th] and the other always has only [dh], then this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as one verb or the other can have either pronunciation, the distinction is not phonemic. This process, variation leading to change, is an extremely common ingredient of linguistic change. When two forms, created by different rules, are in competition, a number of things may happen: 1) Both forms will continue in use as free variants (thus 'dived', 'dove' [verb]). 2) One form will simply replace the other and the other will disappear ('doth', 'does'). 3) One form (normally the one formed by the productive rule) will become the general form and the other will be marginalized and used in a restricted sense ('brothers', 'brethren'). 4) The two forms will split, each specializing in some meaning and become two separate lexical items. The plural of 'staff' ('staf') was originally 'staves'; then a second plural 'staffs' develops. 'Staves' then acquires a separate meaning from 'staffs' and a singular is formed by reversing the productive rule for plural formation: 'stave'. The result is two lemmata with (slightly) different meanings, 'staff' and 'stave'. Only in the area of musical terminology are the two words coterminous. >As an aside, I have just noticed that OED2 cites the very >obscure noun 'mouthing', meaning 'entrance to a mine', with >theta only -- perhaps somewhat unexpectedly. I don't know what to do with this one either. >Another aside. While a blacksmith's shop is a 'smithy', with >edh, a person called Smith gets the diminutive 'Smithy', with >theta, in my experience -- just as in 'Kathy'. (By the way, does >anyone want to claim that 'Kathy' is less than fully English?) My dictionary records 'smithy' with either [th] or [dh] and in my dialect the hypocoristicon for a person named Smith is 'Smitty'. But if you use [th] and [dh] to distinguish between a person named Smith and a blacksmith's shop, then /th/ and /dh/ are phonemes in your dialect (and this can't be argued against; de gustibus non est disputandum). But it isn't in mine. And 'Kathy' is fully English in the same way that 'sympathy' and 'pathetic' are. Although 'C/Katherine' (and probably the diminutive 'Kathy') has been in the language longer, they all postdate the sound change that voiced intervocalic spirants. So 'Kathy' follows the same rules, as English as it may be. The question is does [kathi:] contrast with [kadhi:] anywhere? The point is not that English words can't have intervocalic [th]. The point is that all Greek and Latin loans and neologisms in English have intervocalic [th]. There are a number of examples of intervocalic [th] in native English words caused by such things as the position of the stress which caused the voicing rule not to operate or the fact that there was originally a doubled [th] in the word which was subsequently simplified leaving an intervocalic single [th] high and dry. But the point is that the distribution of intervocalic [th] in English is not arbitrary. It can always be accounted for by rule. This is why English can get by with a single graphic symbol for both [th] and [dh]. Even when the English alphabet had separate signs for both sounds, ? (thorn) and ? (edh), they were never used systematically, but were more or less interchangeable. The pronunciation was always predictable. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Oct 17 20:14:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 16:14:05 EDT Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/17/00 1:41:16 PM Mountain Daylight Time, roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: << In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most welcome. >> -- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha >Old Norse merr, 'mare', Old English miere, 'mare', Old High German meriha, 'mare'. There's a Celtic cognate but only with the general meaning of "horse"; Gaulish 'marco', Old Irish 'marc', Welsh 'march'. From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Wed Oct 18 02:25:59 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 18:25:59 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20001006184727.03edd84c@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: The eminent British folklorist Katherine Briggs discusses a range of "bug"/"puca" names used for spirits in Welsh and Irish folklore. Can't remember which of her books it's in though (probably her _Encyclopedia_); sorry, my library's all packed. >I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have >dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I am interested in >finding articles that have been written on either of these two items as >well as more general articles dealing with the folklore and customs >associated with either concept. Max Dashu International Women's Studies since 1970 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Oct 18 14:53:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:53:30 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify articles that have > dealt with the etymology of 'nightmare' or 'bugbear'. I haven't seen any articles, but I'm not aware there's any great mystery about the etymology of either. The OED provides fully documented etymologies for both. The first is built on Old English 'female goblin', the feminine form of 'goblin'. This word is recorded from at least AD 700 in English, and it has established cognates in other Germanic languages. In English, it was applied from the beginning to an imaginary monster which perched on people's chests while they slept and caused them to feel suffocation or other distress. From the late 13th century, the word often came to be reinforced by 'night', in the same sense. The original form 'mare' endured until the 17th century, at least, after which it died out, though Dr. Johnson listed it in his 1755 dictionary. For a long time, 'nightmare' continued to denote the monster, in which sense it competed with the alternative 'night-hag'. Until well into the 19th century, the usual locution was still 'to have the nightmare'. Only in the 19th century does the OED record any citations in which the newer sense of 'bad dream' seems to be intended. Since then, this has become the only sense, and the locution has become 'to have a nightmare'. With the disappearance of the original 'mare' from the language, an obvious folk-etymology has led to the reinterpretation of the second part of 'nightmare' as the unrelated word 'mare' (= 'female horse'). As for 'bugbear', this appears to be built on the obsolete word 'bug', meaning 'an object of terror, especially an imaginary one', 'bogey man'. This is suspected of deriving from an early Welsh word 'ghost', 'hobgoblin'. This 'bug' is recorded from the late 14th century to the early 18th century, since when it has died out. The compound 'bugbear' is recorded from the late 16th century, and its second element is apparently the ordinary word 'bear', the animal name. It originally denoted an imaginary monster, presumably in the shape of a bear, which supposedly ate naughty children, and which was used by nurses to threaten children. This sense eventually died out in favor of the more general sense of 'an object of needless dread', 'imaginary terror'. It is possible, though far from certain, that the original 'bug' is continued in 'bogey man'. The problem is that 'bogey man' is not recorded until long after the original 'bug' had apparently disappeared from the language. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Oct 18 03:01:05 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 22:01:05 -0500 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2000 10:57 AM > besides *sreu- "to flow" Watkins 1985 gives > *srebh- "to suck, absorb" < ? *sreu- in the sense of "to (make) flow in" ? > and also superficially resembles Arabic sh-r-b- "to drink" [PR] I believe that Arabic sh-r-b, 'to drink', is relatable to Egyptian S3b, 'meals, food', and that the basic meaning is '(movement down the) throat'. I have found in my own Nostratic studies that Ar./Egy. sh = IE gw-/kw-. Therefore, I believe that the underlying biliteral root corresponds to IE *gwer-, 'swallow, throat'; and that a group of derivations like English 'grub' should be related to a presently non-acknowledged IE *gwrebh- rather than the presently reconstructed *ghrebh-. A key cognate in this context appears to me to be OHG gruoba, 'excavation, throat'. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) [ Moderator's note: If further discussion of possible Nostratic etymologies is desired, please move them to that mailing list. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Oct 18 15:49:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 10:49:59 -0500 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >I won't comment on the place names, but I will point out that the >adjective 'blithe' has both pronunciations, with final [th] and >with final [dh]. The pronunciation with [dh] is regular since >the OE form was 'bli:the'. The adjective 'lithe' is similar in >all respects. My impression is that US pronunciations for are regional perhaps analogous to the greasy-greazy pronunciations in this one case In Ohio, where I grew up, I only heard /blaiTH/ but in the South (South Carolina, Mississippi) I usually hear /blaiDH/ What is the usual British pronunciation? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Thu Oct 19 03:09:09 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 19:09:09 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Joat Simeon writes, >-- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', >possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha >>Old Norse merr, 'mare', Old English miere, 'mare', Old High German meriha, >'mare'. >There's a Celtic cognate but only with the general meaning of "horse"; >Gaulish 'marco', Old Irish 'marc', Welsh 'march'. There's another root, mahra, having to do with spirits and night hags. My notes are all packed for moving, so I can't offer details, but variants of this word are found across a wide range of IE languages. Max Dashu From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Oct 19 07:35:24 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:35:24 +0200 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following quotation is from a post by JoatSimeon at aol.com dated 17 Oct. --rma ] >In a message dated 10/17/00 1:41:16 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< In reference to the comparative studies, I would be most pleased to find > those that have examined the different phonological variants of this 'mare' > that are found in Germanic and Slavic. Celtic materials would also be most > welcome. >> >-- the Germanic "mare" is a derived feminine of PIE *markos ('horse', >possibly 'wild horse'), with the feminine ending, -ih(a), thus *markiha Fine, but what does this have to do with "nightmare" ? Is it a horse which haunts you at night ? Well, not me, I'm afraid. What does haunt people in bad nights is a (Germ.) "Mahr" (G. /Nachtmahr/ is the equivalent to e. /nightmare/). A /Mahr/ is a.k.o. demon, ghost osthlth, OHG /mara/, OE /mare/, ON /mara/; this is also found in Slavic, Czech /mu:ra/, russ. (kiki-)mora, and in Celtic, OIr /morri:gain/. IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.". No horses here. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Thu Oct 19 11:19:18 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:19:18 +0100 Subject: re Minimal pairs Message-ID: With some variation in the vowel, the British/English English pronunciations are all blaidh ('Hail to thee, blithe spirit ...'; Blyth in Northumberland; Blythe Bridge in Staffordshire). But I am not omniscient in these matters .... [The late Professor E Fraenkel was unaware that 'threepence' is/was (in the days of shillings and pence at 20/240 to the pound sterling) in some places pronounced as 'three' plus 'pence', not the 'threppence' or 'thruppence' which were the most common articulations. For some reason, after the pound turned into 100 pence instead (by way of 100 new pence, everyone took up the 'three pence' version, perhaps because of a tendency on the part of some to say X pee, not X pence, and the insertion of the 'new'. And a new locution 'one pence' appeared as well. Do not know if this new singular is yet in any part of the OED. Sorry - that looks more relevant to another current thread.] Gordon At 10:49 am 18/10/00, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] >My impression is that US pronunciations for are >regional perhaps analogous to the greasy-greazy pronunciations in this one >case >In Ohio, where I grew up, I only heard /blaiTH/ but in the South (South >Carolina, Mississippi) I usually hear /blaiDH/ >What is the usual British pronunciation? From sarima at friesen.net Fri Oct 20 03:38:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 20:38:07 -0700 Subject: minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:59 PM 10/15/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >But scythe is quite regular, the OE form being 'si:the' and hence >the is intervocalic and should have gone to [dh]. My >pronunciation, however, is [sai] and hence is homophonous with >'sigh'. Fascinating. Mine is the "expected" [saidh] - both as a verb and a noun. >'Swathe' (or 'swath') as a noun meaning "(like) a path cut with a >scythe" is difficult because it is mixed up with an unrelated >verb 'swathe' "to wrap, bind" (connected with 'swaddle'). Which my dialect has resolved by losing the verb. >It is quite true that nouns in /-Vth/ can be used as verbs >without any change. What we have here is the productive rule of >verb formation (NOUN --> VERB / ...) coming into conflict with >the markedness rule for verb formation (final spirant voicing >rule). The problem I have here is that, at least in my dialect, that latter rule is no longer productive (in the sense of "used to spontaneously form new words"). Nobody I know would expect to be able to create a verb by this means that would be *understood* as such (except by context). >this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as one verb or the >other can have either pronunciation, the distinction is not >phonemic. Here I disagree - I would treat most such pairs either as synonymous words that happen to be similar, or as dialectal variants. This would only rule out phoneme status if *all* such pairs had identical meanings. If even a *few* show different meanings based on the difference in pronunciation, then that is sufficient to establish phoneme status. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Sat Oct 21 06:27:51 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 19:27:51 +1300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] -----Original Message----- From: Robert Whiting [mailto:whiting at cc.helsinki.fi] Sent: Monday, 16 October 2000 12:54 a.m. RW> On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: [ moderator snip ] RC>> I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are talking about the RC>> synchronic phonology of modern English, and (ii) the reality that we are RC>> trying to get at is what is in speakers' heads. RW> First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about the synchronic RW> phonology of modern English. About the second point, I am much less RW> sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how language works RW> linguistically (some areas are easier than others), but I don't think that RW> we are in a position to say what goes on in a speaker's head to produce RW> language. While it would certainly be nice to know, I think that the RW> cognitive processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the RW> moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you RW> can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we can get at RW> is the language that speakers produce. RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on empirically RW> verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a hypothesis about how RW> native speakers produce their language. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is RW> an explanation put forward to account for observable facts. People tend to RW> forget this and consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality RW> may exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the present time RW> with our present knowledge. In general, I agree that what we are trying to RW> get at is the reality in speakers' heads, but it is a roundabout road that RW> we have to take and we have to have a realistic picture of language before RW> we are likely to get there. I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to another, and hence subject to the same epistemological vulnerability you attribute to the latter. So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being based are of the same sort. On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is "realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without reference to any possible mental reality? RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further assumption that RC>> native speakers of modern English (in general, not just linguists) RC>> distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, and that the words I listed RC>> with /th/ in voiced environments are marked as "foreign". Since I don't RC>> share this assumption, I would like to know what evidence leads you to it. RC>> Do you have any such evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these RC>> hundreds of words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? RW> Let me answer this from back to front. RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by rule the RW> [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other than hundreds of RW> examples and the fact that it produces a nice phonological generalization. This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for Grimm's Law or RW> Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide RW> a nice phonological generalization. No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and /dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. [ moderator snip ] RW> As for what evidence I have that native speakers are able to keep track of RW> foreign words (although not necessarily specifically as "foreign" words), I RW> have already quoted Hock 1986 elsewhere, but for the sake of overkill, I RW> will quote it here again: RW> The importance of the Old Irish example is twofold. First it RW> suggests that 'nativization by adoption' is qualitatively RW> different from the other nativization processes: It does not RW> really nativize at all, but merely 'admits' foreign words into RW> the language without losing track of the fact that they are RW> and remain foreign. It is only after these words have been RW> around for quite some time, have been used often enough, and RW> in enough different and novel contexts, that speakers may RW> slowly begin to lose the feeling that they are not native. RW> Nativization by adoption, then, is not an immediate process, RW> but one of slow, gradual, even grudging acceptance. RW> Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), 396-97 RW> This is only one person's opinion, but I don't doubt that similar RW> statements could be found in other textbooks of historical linguistics, so RW> I will consider it as evidence that native speakers can recognize foreign RW> words, if they have not been phonologically nativized, for a considerable RW> time after they have entered the language, by their phonological RW> peculiarities. The general possibility is not in question; the question is about particular examples. Hock offers evidence in the Old Irish case, namely the failure of p-initial words "for some time" to participate in the lenition process. This would certainly mark them as exceptional in that respect. But note that he does not argue that the mere fact of having initial p- is evidence of their "foreign" status. RW> If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized pronunciation of RW> 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after it entered the language RW> (first attested in 1601 according to my dictionary). Actually, my American Heritage dictionary gives a fully anglicized pronunciation /S'?ns at n/ (initial sh-, rhymes with "Manson"), but I admit I've never heard it. The word has probably been re-introduced once or twice since 1601, but the persistence of the nasal-vowel pronunciation is no mystery: the word refers to specifically French things (medieval epic poems or 19th-20th century popular songs), and it is used almost entirely by people who have some familiarity with French and could tell you (if you would allow this as data) that it's a French word. RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still recognize RW> foreign words after several centuries or not. The pronunciation rules are RW> marked in the lexicon. The native speaker learns these rules and follows RW> them. It is these rules that produce the pattern, not the speaker's RW> perception of the words as native or non-native. RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule the [th] of RW> loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the pattern created by the RW> presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in English words. This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. RW> But first it is necessary to show that a pattern actually exists. If there RW> is no pattern, which the theory relies on, then the theory is falsified. RW> While the fact that the six typical English words that you offered as RW> examples (pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic, Arthur) are RW> indeed all loan words is suggestive, it is not really sufficient. RW> To see if there is a pattern, I have taken a lemmatized list of English RW> words based on the British National Corpus (BNC) available on the web at RW> http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html [ moderator snip ] RW> One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 lemmata with RW> intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native (and 5 of these are RW> clearly derivative). You say that there are hundreds of these words in the RW> language (and so there are, if not thousands). This makes one point quite RW> clear. While there may be quite a large number of loan words in English, RW> the core vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily RW> native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences in a RW> corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you eliminate RW> derivatives) of these lemmata. I'm not sure this elaborate demonstration was necessary. Nobody disputes that the pattern exists in words of OE origin. Nor is it any secret that non-OE words are less frequent in basic vocabulary than in the lexicon at large. RW> This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the lemmata with RW> intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. The larger one's RW> vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as an absolute, but as a RW> percentage of the total) one is likely to know. Vocabulary size is also RW> correlated with educational level. Hence by the time that one has acquired RW> a large number of such lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated RW> to realize that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are RW> not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even RW> mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor often RW> consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. Thus my test of RW> the pronunciation of these words may not be entirely accurate, since I am RW> relying on my own pronunciation and on the pronunciation given by the RW> dictionary. As a turnabout, if you have evidence that native speakers RW> regularly mispronounce these words because they don't know that they are RW> loans, that would be germane. I'm puzzled by you asking me for this evidence. As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says (among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. Only the more educated and literate speakers may realize that these exceptional words are loans. (Surely, however, this is not a function of the number of such words in one's vocabulary, but of things one reads or is taught.) Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking for such evidence. By the way, 6318 words is a pretty basic vocabulary. And your list doesn't include some words (arithmetic, ether, various personal names) that were part of my vocabulary and that of all my contemporaries by the age of 10. RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the speakers of RW> the language is the fact that the pattern exists. For if there is a RW> pattern in a language, synchronically it must be created by its speakers RW> because that is the only place that language comes from. If the pattern is RW> not created by rule, then it is simple coincidence. No, this is where you go wrong. The pattern has been created by historical changes in the language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their rule-governed language behaviour. RW> You said above that RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments RC>> are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, RC>> ... RW> You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact that words in RW> English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly loan words because the RW> speakers of the language are unaware that these are loans. As I mentioned RW> above, this is not just a weak argument, it is a spurious one. It may be RW> true that most speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is RW> irrelevant to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then RW> most linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a RW> language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic mechanisms of RW> their language. Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any way. Your only basis for disagreement seems to be that your single-phoneme analysis requires them to be marked as exceptions. Other evidence one might imagine, such as deviant morphophonemic behaviour, acquisition difficulties, or the existence of more "nativized" variants, appears to be entirely lacking. Excuse me. I'm tired, and I see there are at least a dozen paragraphs left. I'll snip them for now, and perhaps we can return to them another time, if this has not drifted too far off-topic for IE. Ross Clark From sarima at friesen.net Fri Oct 20 03:43:09 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 20:43:09 -0700 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:53 PM 10/18/00 +0100, Larry Trask wrote: >In English, it was applied from the beginning to an imaginary monster >which perched on people's chests while they slept and caused them >to feel suffocation or other distress. ... >... Until well into >the 19th century, the usual locution was still 'to have the nightmare'. Well, it seems I often have the nightmare - I have a condition called sleep apnea which causes me to frequently stop breathing while asleep (unless treated). The description above sounds like a pre-modern explanation of apnea. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Oct 20 05:58:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 01:58:24 EDT Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/19/2000 6:04:37 PM, Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Fine, but what does this have to do with "nightmare" ? Is it a horse which haunts you at night? Well, not me, I'm afraid. What does haunt people in bad nights is a (Germ.) "Mahr" (G. /Nachtmahr/ is the equivalent to e. /nightmare/).... IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.".>> Now, hold your horses there, pilgrim. :-) There may be a little bit of horse involved in the history of this word/concept. One of the earliest descriptions of a severe incident of nightmare appears in the "Ynglingasaga": "Then Dr?fa sent for Huld, a seithr kona, and sent V?sbur, her son by Vanlandi, to Sweden. Dr?fa prevailed upon Huld by gifts that she should conjure Vanlandi back to Finnland or else kill him. At the time when she exercised her seithr, Vanlandi was at Uppsala. Then he became eager to go to Finnland; but his friends and counselors stayed him from doing so, saying that most likely it was the witchcraft of the Finns which caused his longing. Then a drowsiness came over him and he lay down to sleep. But he had hardly gone to sleep when he called out, saying that a mara rode him. His men went to him and wanted to help him. But when they took hold of his head the mara trod on his legs so they nearly broke; and when they seized his feet it stepped down down on his head so that he died." (Ynglingasaga,13) Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." The connection also comes up in Old French, in which the OED mentions , nightmare. is to trample and seems also to refer to the work of a horse or other large animal. In the other direction, some of the earliest instances in English mention the Greek, as a medical reference I think, , "nightmare" which is specifically defined as early as Homer as a "throttling demon" that comes at night. Parallel to the Finnish witch's conjuring in the saga, the meaning in Greek seems to be from (fut. epialo:), to set upon, to send something after someone. But it seems there was one instance where a miswrite also turned into , Middle Latin/Greek for "saddled". The irony seems to be that the accidental connection with horses comes from every which direction. But obviously as early as there are sources in English and ON we see some kind of allusion to "riding" and "trampling." (And clearly the mara is not just any goblin or spirit, it is already in 700AD an "incubus.") In "The Conception of the Nightmare in Sweden" Tillhagen, Carl-Herman; in Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folklore,etc. eds. Wayland D. Hand and Gustave O. Arlt. J.J. Augistin. 1960. pp. 317-329, (a cite for you Roz), the tradition seems to be that the "marr" can take the shape of a horse or an elk or other large animal and actually take you for a ride, where you get all banged up and die. Stefan Georg also writes: << OHG /mara/, OE /mare/, ON /mara/; this is also found in Slavic, Czech /mu:ra/, russ. (kiki-)mora, and in Celtic, OIr/morri:gain/. IE sthl. *mora: "a k. o. ghost, malevolent spirit othl.". >> Something else. The original OED cites the "synonymous Polish" , but there is another word in Polish, , that meant nothing more than to dream or to imagine. And that brings up other words that refer to illusion or deception: "ma:rrach, a thicket to catch cattle. Root: mar, mer, deceive, as in mear brath." (McBain's Etym Dictionary of Gaelic) and the Greek , folly, delusion. But, given the trampling and crushing theme in all the early accounts, perhaps the Sanskrit , to crush, and the Latin , hammer, are worth noting. Perhaps "mara" was originally a nickname, like "Old Scratch", for a spirit of the night called "Mr. Crush." In any case, it feels like there are just too many possible twist and turns in the etymologies to warrant much confidence in there having been a specific word "*mora:" that meant "ghost, malevolent spirit" in PIE, whether or not that word can be reconstructed based on rather simplified semantics. Regards, Steve Long PS - Good to see you all back on the list. From cnarayan at socrates.Berkeley.EDU Mon Oct 23 04:03:54 2000 From: cnarayan at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Chandan Narayan) Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 21:03:54 -0700 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" In-Reply-To: <87.1ba1791.27213900@aol.com> Message-ID: Dear IE-ists, I don't know if this reference has been brought up as i'm new to this discussion, but Wendy Doniger addresses and discusses the Indo-European Mare quite thoroughly in her _Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts_ (Chicago, 1980). Sorry if this is old news. Best, Chandan Narayan chandan r. narayan || cnarayan at socrates.berkeley.edu || socrates.berkeley.edu/~cnarayan "You couldn't fool your mother on the most foolingist day of your life, even if you had an electrified fooling machine. " From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Oct 23 08:28:07 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 09:28:07 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" and "bugbear" Message-ID: Steve Long writes [on 'nightmare']: > There may be a little bit of horse involved in the history of this > word/concept. One of the earliest descriptions of a severe incident of > nightmare appears in the "Ynglingasaga": [snip part of story] > But he had hardly > gone to sleep when he called out, saying that a mara rode him. His men went > to him and wanted to help him. But when they took hold of his head the mara > trod on his legs so they nearly broke; and when they seized his feet it > stepped down down on his head so that he died." (Ynglingasaga,13) > Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara > "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might > have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in > some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from > 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." Yes, but the Old English verb did not mean exclusively 'sit on a horse'. It also commonly meant 'sit on (anything)', 'perch on (anything)'. This use is attested as early as Beowulf, according to the OED, and it was common in early English. It is still in the language today. So, there is nothing odd about speaking of the (night)mare as 'riding' its victim. Nor can I see this as implying anything horsey: we ride horses, but horses don't ride us. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Oct 24 12:17:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 08:17:02 EDT Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: I wrote: > Now what's a little odd about this is that, in this tradition, the mara > "rides" you. The Old Norse for horse (of either gender) -- marr -- might > have been source of this confusion. But the "riding" element also occurs in > some of the earliest references in English. The OED cites a quote from > 1000AD: "Gif mon mare ride..." In a message dated 10/23/2000 9:14:26 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <> Well, the original OED does not have it as quite that common at all, and gives the definition of a non-horse use (that I believe you are referring to) with a key qualification: "To sit or be carried on or upon something after the manner of one on horseback..." So the usage you refer to is sent right back to horses, an analogy. Almost all the early quotes cited apply to horses or other animals, especially the intransitive. I believe even the first use of ride with a wagon is only dated from 1300. And the earlier etymology given have to do with "traveling" and nothing to do with sitting or perching. There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall upon you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, only the mare "rides" you. In an earlier message, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << With the disappearance of the original 'mare' from the language, an obvious folk-etymology has led to the reinterpretation of the second part of 'nightmare' as the unrelated word 'mare' (= 'female horse'). >> And of course there is no reason why "mare" wouldn't have been interpreted this way before it disappeared from the language. It would be odd indeed if early folk didn't see the possible connection, but all of a sudden it struck everyone when "night" was added. Especially when we are told that the "mare-induced bad dream is called... martr? (mare-ride) in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, mareridt (mare-ride) in Danish, mareritt (mare-ride) in Norwegian,..." And it's quite clear that the victims in the more dramatic examples are not merely be being perched or sat on, but as in the "Ynglingasaga" are being stomped to death. Larry Trask also writes: <> I don't know about that!!! I won't ask how often you get "ridden" every day. Or night. I guess that the habit of battling dubious etymologies can motivate one to find it common for all sorts of things to "ride" humans. The last time anything "rode" me, however, it was a five-year old who kept yelling, "giddy-up!" Not something I have had happen to me otherwise. And so rather odd indeed. <<...we ride horses, but horses don't ride us.>> Unless, of course, that riding is done by "mares." Meanings are never as neat and tidy as we'd like for them to be. Meanings definitely don't follow the paths of genetic descent. Meanings keep popping up in the wrong pigeon-holes. Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Oct 25 10:25:36 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 13:25:36 +0300 Subject: "nightmare" In-Reply-To: <5a.c380346.2726d7be@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the > ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall upon > you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, only > the mare "rides" you. Then what is the origin of the expressions 'priest-ridden' and 'hag-ridden'? Or is 'hag-ridden' a folk etymology of *'nag-ridden'? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Oct 25 15:02:27 2000 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 17:02:27 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Response to the comments made on Sun, 15 Oct. 2000 by Robert Whiting : Overall, I detect in your contributions a concerted attack on the traditional concept of "phoneme". Instead of being the smallest distinctive unit of speech, a phoneme then becomes an abstract concept which, after the application of a number of similarly abstract rules, is transformed into the speech sound we actually hear. I do not like the direction into which this will take us, because then a marvellously simple tool of descriptive linguistics will disappear. To illustrate my comments, let us look at the voiceless/voiced contrast of intravocalic dental fricatives in English. If we regard the two sounds as different phonemes, we have a very simple way to transcribe phonemically "faith" and "bathe" as /feth/ and /bedh/, respectively (/th/ and /dh/ obviously standing for the symbols theta and edh). If I understand your approach, you would represent these two words something like /feth + foreign (or - verb?)/ and /beth +verb/, respectively. What on earth is the advantage here? Shouldn't simplicity be an important criterion in linguistics (or any other descriptive science)? I do not dispute the fact that in languages there can be, and often are, patterns in phoneme distribution that are correlated with morphological factors, vocabulary origin and the like. There can also be marginal phonemes that occur in a few words only. Indeed, phonemes may occur only in words recently borrowed, e.g. /b/ and /g/ in Finnish. There must still be, IMHO, an unambiguous way to denote such sounds without reference to non-phonetic criteria. If we don't subscribe to this principle, there is no end to the complications that ingenious linguists can introduce into the description of languages. Now for additional points related to your posting: (RW) >... we are indeed talking about the >synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second point, >I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to describe how >language works linguistically (some areas are easier than >others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say what >goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it would >certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive processes >that produce language are beyond our reach at the moment. >Speakers themselves don't know how they produce language, so you >can't find out by just asking them. So the only reality that we >can get at is the language that speakers produce. (GS) I agree with this completely. We cannot get into people's heads, therefore - until our knowledge of neurology improves drastically - we should consider the brain as a black box. All evidence about language should be based on observations of how language is used. (RW) >Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based on >empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on a >hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >to get there. (GS) Has anybody really claimed that synchronic grammar is in some way real? It is real only insofar as it is a human artifact, just as philosophy and esthetics are, for example. Otherwise, synthetic grammar should be considered as just a model of the rules that govern actual language use. If this model is contradicted by observed language use, it is clearly false and should be corrected. (snip) (RW) >You ask what evidence I have that native speakers distinguish by >rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words other >than hundreds of examples and the fact that it produces a nice >phonological generalization. This seems rather like asking what >evidence I have for Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than >hundreds of examples and the fact that they provide a nice >phonological generalization. What more can one ask of a theory >(or hypothesis or law) than that it account for the observed data >in a consistent and concise manner and that it provide a reliable >generalization? Nothing, really, except, of course, that it have >a test for falsification. (GS) Do people question the validity of your generalization? Given that we know a lot about the history of English, we can see that there is indeed a pattern, and that, indeed, intervocalic /th/ is restricted to borrowed words. But it's only because we know the history of English that we can say this - if we didn't know it, there would be no objective criteria telling us that, say, "author" is borrowed and "feather" is not. Marking "author" as +borrowed as part of the proof that only borrowed words have intervocalic [th] sounds like a circular argument to me. To show how easy it would be to lead us astray with such arguments, let us consider Indo-European /b/. This is widely known to be a rare phoneme in PIE, and I would love to be able to show that it was actually absent from early stages of the proto-language, and all its occurrences are in late loanwords, assimilations and the like. *abol (apple) and *belos (strong) are among the few words where *b may be reconstructed, so why not claim that they are borrowings? I would be hesitant to do so, however, because there is no independent evidence that they are borrowings, and the claim is easily seen to be made for the specific purpose of proving something about the absence of PIE *b. (snip) Since I don't at all dispute that there is a pattern in the distribution of th/dh in English, let me reiterate what I think is my main point: For the description of a language, it is essential to have recourse to phonemes as basic building blocks of speech. If two sounds are in actual or potential contrast, they belong to different phonemes. This is true even if in most (or even all) of their occurrences the choice as to which one occurs is predictable based on some non-phonetic criteria. Of course, if you manage to expropriate the term "phoneme" for your purposes, those of us needing the concept for the original use of the term (say, in order to show the pronunciation of words in a dictionary) will have to call phonemes something else, won't we... All the best, Gabor Sandi From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Oct 26 02:22:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:22:48 -0500 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: I hesitate (perhaps not enough) to get into this, but people DO know what the phonemes of their language are, they just don't know what the term means. Practically speaking, it is fairly easy to determine that /r/ and /l/ are not separate phonemes in Japanese, or /p/ and /ph/ in English, merely by speaking as if they are and noting the bewildered look on unsophisticated native faces ... I believe Sapir has a comment somewhere to the effect that if you want to know whether something is a phoneme in an Indian's language, ask him. You just have to ask the right, i.e. indirect, question, not "Is this a phoneme?", but "Is this a possible different word?" I think Sapir probably had enough experience that he should know. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Oct 26 02:38:03 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:38:03 EDT Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/25/2000 8:08:27 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes: << Then what is the origin of the expressions 'priest-ridden' and 'hag-ridden'? Or is 'hag-ridden' a folk etymology of *'nag-ridden'? >> OED I has a number of difference references to hag as some kind of spirit, but none of them occur before the 16th century in English. More importantly, the ONLY one I see where the hag "rides" is in the following from 1696: "It is to prevent the Night-Mare (viz.) the Hag from riding their Horses." In some cases, it seems it is a witch (as in the Ynglingasaga) that sends or brings the mare. This is the "ride" that gets the mare to the victim, sometimes on horseback, rather than the "riding" of the victim. Kveldulf Hagen Gundarsson writes in "The Folklore of the Wild Hunt and the Furious Host": "Witches are also called "mirk-riders" (Harbardhzliodh 20) and "evening-riders" (Helgakvidha Hjorvardhzsonar 15), though these latter titles may refer to the magical act of nightmare-riding, rather than to the haunting ride through the air, such as that carried out by the 'Darradhrljodh' valkyries..." (Mountain Thunder (Cambridge Folklore Soc.), issue 7,1992.) But it seems from what I can gather that the business of the non-"mare" kind of "hags" is not "riding" victims at all, though they do come specifically at night to suck your blood or "change" your children or as just plain harbingers, sometimes on horseback or even on reindeer. (As to "priest-ridden" I see no reference to it in several different volumes. Sounds kind of Joycean.) Going back to my original statement: > There's simple logic involved here. There were all kinds of spirits in the > ancient times and in the early middle ages that would restrain you, fall > upon you and do you physical violence of all sorts, but as far as I can tell, > only the mare "rides" you. This still SEEMS to be true. But I have no clear idea of why it would be so. Folk etymology (AS: mare ride and mareridt) may be an explanation. But if it is, it seems to be very old and remarkably congruent for two supposedly distinct ideas. On the other hand, the Greeks (ephilates) and Romans (suppressio nocturea; later Latin, incubo) seem to have named the phenomenon directly, unambiguously and without any reference to either "mare" or "ride". So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole idea ran in Basque.) Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Oct 26 02:40:23 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:40:23 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Forgive me if my mind is, as usual since the sudden onset of testosterone poisoning many years ago, languishing in the gutter (all the best stuff is down there), or if we have covered this during my absence, but is not the expression being "ridden by the nightmare" what is known as sexual reference, to succubus dreams with "woman on top" and all that stuff? In the middle ages of Northwestern Europe, apart from the feeling that sex was evil, and if it felt good did so in roughly the same sense that "bodily functions" might be said to, there was also the feeling that for a man to be the passive partner was inherently effeminate and therefore shameful. We see this for example in Norse attitudes toward homosexuality. With both these syndromes operating, it is small wonder that dreams of this sort where a man feels himself "ridden" by a spirit could be regarded as traumatizing, which is to say as nightmares. From there the more general meaning is (duh) a generalization, no? Things like "priest-ridden" are, I have always thought, by analogy with things like "flea-ridden" and "tick-ridden", where the creatures in question could most certainly by said to be literally riding their unfortunate hosts. The semantic leap from "ridden" to "infested" under such circumstances is surely not a great one. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Oct 27 14:45:02 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 15:45:02 +0100 Subject: word a day? Message-ID: There used to be a web site with a PIE root and its derivatives, changed once a day. Anyone know what the address is? My search machines have failed me. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Oct 29 16:03:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 16:03:05 +0000 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in > nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be > reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and > complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole > idea ran in Basque.) The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and 'succubus'. Other Basque words, like and , are used much more generally, to denote just about any kind of hobgoblin or imp. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Sun Oct 29 22:18:12 2000 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 09:18:12 +1100 Subject: "nightmare" In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:38:03 EDT." Message-ID: So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole idea ran in Basque.) The common contemporary word in Basque is "amesgaizto" which translates as "bad dream". I'm unaware of any older expression that might shed light on the current discussion Jon Patrick ______________________________________________________________ From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Oct 31 03:43:15 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 22:43:15 -0500 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In the Island of Sheep (published I think in the 1920's John Buchan has the following collocation: "The Trolls ..... hag-rode the cattle, and sucked the blood of young lambs ..." -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com To: Indo-European at xkl.com Date: Saturday, October 28, 2000 5:32 PM Subject: Re: "nightmare" [ moderator snip ] From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk Mon Oct 30 18:41:21 2000 From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 18:41:21 +0000 Subject: word a day? Message-ID: Peter You may find what you're looking for on 'The Indo-European Database'. Go to http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/atoday.html and click on 'Today's root". (you can find back pages via http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/project/phonetics/). Best Bruce [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Oct 31 06:50:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 01:50:31 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Way, way back on 14 Mar 2000, g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote: <> Hopefully the statue of limitations hasn't run out on this particular exchange. Putting aside for now the factual basis for horse-riding hero-worshippers carrying IE into "much of Europe," there's a point here that raises a linguistic question that might provide linguistic evidence of what actually happened back then. If "the farming population of much of Europe switched language" to IE (by conquest or otherwise) from something other than IE, then of course there may be that "substratal influence" to find. Or, by analogy with the examples given, "plenty of substratal influence." But there is an interesting twist to this substrate issue proposed by none other than Cavalli-Sforza: "It should be noted that [Renfrew's] hypothesis is not incompatible with Gimbutas' hypothesis. It is perfectly possible that neolithic farmers brought early Indo-European languages not only to Europe but also to southern Russia, together with agriculture, and that their descendants, who developed nomadic pastoralism in the Kurgan steppes carried their languages, which was still of Indo-European origin but transformed from the original.... If this fusion of hypothesis from Gimbutas and Renfrew is correct, the proto-Indo-European language reconstructed by linguists on the basis of [sic] modern Indo-European languages must be much closer to that which was spoken in the Kurgan area some five or six millennia ago, than to the pre-proto-Indo-European spoken by Anatolian farmers." L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The Spread of Agriculture and Nomadic Pastoralism, from The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, edited by David R. Harris, Smithsonian Institution Press (1996), 66. Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would ultimately be of the same origin? Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Oct 31 18:46:22 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 11:46:22 -0700 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <000a01c03ef3$a30eb900$046163d1@texas.net> Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > I hesitate (perhaps not enough) to get into this, but people DO know what the > phonemes of their language are, they just don't know what the term means.... > I believe Sapir has a comment somewhere to the effect that if you want to > know whether something is a phoneme in an Indian's language, ask him. You > just have to ask the right, i.e. indirect, question, not "Is this a > phoneme?", but "Is this a possible different word?" I think Sapir probably > had enough experience that he should know. You're probably referring to the famous paper "On the Psychological Reality of Phonemes" (reprinted in David Mandelbaum's collection of Sapir's most influential papers). To briefly summarize and simplify for clarity what Sapir experienced with Tony Tillohash (his Kaibab Southern Paiute consultant), and simplifying the phonetics for the ASCII character set, the citation form for 'water' in Colorado River Numic (the single language of which Southern Paiute, Ute, and Chemehuevi are dialects) is [pa], but when it is the second element of a compound, it is [-va], as in 'big water' [piava]. When Sapir asked Tony to say the word with compounded pa ([-va]) slowly, he consistently said, [pi-a-pa] rather than [pi-a-va]. He then used this to demonstrate how surface phonetics do not interfere with native speakers' intuition about what the sound "really is". My experience in working with Numic languages over the past 25 years, however, has shown that this is not quite so simple. When untrained native speakers have developed their own spelling systems for these seven languages, they have not written the equivalent of pa and piapa, but fairly consistently write the equivalent of pa and piava. The "linguistically accurate" orthography that Wick Miller and Beverly Crum (a native speaker) developed for Gosiute and Western Shoshoni over 30 years ago (which would spell pa and piapa) has not spread within the Shoshoni community beyond the areas where Crum was influential. In contrast, more recent linguists, such as Chris Loether and Drusilla Gould (a native speaker), working on Northern Shoshoni; Pam Bunte and Rob Franklin, working on San Juan Southern Paiute; Arnie Poldevaart, working on Nevada Northern Paiute; Kay Fowler and Harold Abel (a native speaker), working on Nevada Northern Paiute; Talmy Givon, working on Southern Ute; Maurice Zigmond, Chris Booth, and Pam Munro, working on Kawaiisu; Chris Loether and Rosalie Bethel (a native speaker), working on Western Mono; and Lucille McClung and Albert Nahquaddy (both native speakers) along with Alice Anderton, working on Comanche, have all used a more phonetically-based writing system that native speakers seem to prefer much more than that based on "native intuition". While writing systems are not always the best evidence of "native intuition", it's something we can actually put our hands on rather than anecdotal evidence. The Numic consonant gradation processes run the gamut from language to language from being totally frozen relics, to being highly productive modern processes, but throughout the family, the evidence is clear that native speakers prefer piava over piapa. Probably the best indication of the direction which native speakers are actually leaning is the Idaho State University Shoshoni system (the one that I promote with Shoshoni bands that haven't adopted an official writing system yet). There they use b instead of v and spell ba and biaba. That's a lot closer to the psychological reality which Sapir observed, but working from the "inside out", so to speak. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Linguistics Program Director USU 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 Tue Oct 31 23:27:26 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 17:27:26 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <32.c08e79c.272fc5b7@aol.com> Message-ID: >My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look >for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to >speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language >-- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would >one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would >ultimately be of the same origin? It's an interesting question On one hand, there is Alt-Europaeisch hydronyms, toponyms, etc. and on the other there is the Lusitanian-Ligurian-Sorotactic-Mediterranean-"Other Italic"-Illyrian-etc. continuum of substrate lexicon and toponyms of IE origin Are these categories too frequently convenient tags for explaining oddball lexicon? Larry Trask often mentions Basque being used as the rubbish bin of unexplained Ibero-Romance etyma Etruscan sometimes serves the same purpose for Latin, even though some of the vocabulary is claerly of IE origin; e.g. I saw a reference to Tuscan dialect brenti "heather" that declared it to be from Etruscan, yet there are cognate forms in Ibero-Romance and I'd guess that Irish fraoch is also cognate Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701