BL accent patterns. The real results.

[De Reuse, Willem]

Thanks Bob.  And thanks for that paper.  The diachronic analysis is great.  And of course this -A affix was an invention of synchronic phonologists, but it was clever, wasn't it?

Willem, chronic sinner and phonologist.
________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of Rankin, Robert L. [rankin at KU.EDU]
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 5:03 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: BL accent patterns. The real results.

> It is good to notice, though, that some of the disyllabic stems stressed on the first syllable end in the ablauting -A, so according to the Dakota Stress Rule, they are stressed on a monosyllabic stem, since the Dakota Stress Rule applies, if I remember correctly, before the ablauting -A is added to a monosyllabic stem.

Yes, here the synchronic and diachronic analyses differ materially.  Diachronically, there is no such thing as "the ablauting vowel" and consequent consonant-final stems.  This was an invention of synchronic phonologists who needed some way to explain Dakotan accentual patterns.

What really happened in those cases is that the first vowel in the so-called "consonant-final stems" was historically long and, therefore, accented.  The second vowel (called the "ablauting vowel" and written with cap -A) was actually -e.  This short -e was subsequently simply replaced by the vowel that began the following suffix or enclitic, normally -a.

I don't know at the moment whether the original unstressed final -e was lost in Dakotan (actually leaving a consonant-final stem) or whether the -e was just replaced by the V1+V2 ==> V2 rule so common in Siouan languages.  There doesn't seem to be any convincing evidence either way.  Hochunk lost final -e in most environments and Dakota may have shared that change areally.  Hard to say.

But if you look at cognate sets with the so-called "ablauting vowel", you can see immediately that, what we thought was an epenthetic vowel with a "consonant final root" was really short-e with a long root vowel.  The following examples are from a paper on "ablaut" that I wrote and will attach herewith.  I hope our email programs don't mess up the columnar formatting too much:

          make marks   ripe shallow
PSi       *ká:xe          *aRú:te    *xé:pe
CR        -ka:xi                 ó:ši     xé:pi
HI        -ka:xe                ó:te     xé:pi
MA      -kaáx
LA         káγA                lútA     xépA
CH        gá:γe               dú:je     xé:we
WI        gá:x                  tú:č      γé:p
OP         gá:γe               ní:de    xé:be
KS         gá:γe               ǰü:ǰe
OS         ká:γe              cü:ce     xé:pe
QU       ká:γe               títte
BI                             a  tutí       xépi
OF                            a  túti
SP                                              seep

Bob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20130916/ce84a4eb/attachment.html>