ADS-L/NTY synergy

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:21 PM +0200 4/24/01, Paul Frank wrote:
>  > >  I call the
>>  >double-dot in Finnish and Chinese "umlaut" with no shame ...
>>
>>  The Finnish one, at least, IS an umlaut, as is the Turkish
>>  counterpart--they mark the vowels they sit on as fronted.  Seems like
>>  umlautish behavior to me.  Likewise the one in Tibetan, I'm pretty
>>  sure.  I don't know about the Chinese one, though--is it a
>>  vowel-fronter?
>>  larry
>
>Chinese u in, say, lu is also an umlaut. Depending on tone and written
>character, lu can mean law, deer, green, and a number of other things. I
>don't know if it makes sense to speak of umlauts in Chinese. Isn't an umlaut
>a German vowel sound that has changed from u to u or a to a or o to o, such
>as singular Mann and plural Manner? No such process takes place in Chinese.
>But don't take my word for any of this, because I know nothing about
>linguistics. Or is an umlaut such a diacritical mark? In that case the
>pinyin transliteration of Chinese does have umlauts.
>
Well, even in German "umlaut" is also used for non-alternating front
vowels.  The idea, as I understand it, is that the umlaut "changes"
the sound to that of the fronted vowel, although certainly
etymologically your observation is correct.  In most of the languages
we've been discussing, an umlauted vowel is a fronted vowel
regardless of whether that vowel alternates with a back alternant (as
with the singular/plural opposition), i.e. orthographic ü (that's an
u-umlaut) = IPA [y].

(By the way, in my version of the above e-mail, the umlauts were
neutralized out of existence, but their ghosts are reconstructible
from the context.)

larry