sound replacement in loans

Tue Dec 18 13:10:25 UTC 2007

Dear Wolfgang,

If it turned out that a neighboring [r] was involved, it would add an interesting new dimension. Some years ago Geoff Nathan, of Southern Illinois University, did a study of "rhotics" in an attempt to explain why [r] develops such a wide variety of different phonetic manifestations, including things like the New York City labiodental flap, the Danish voiced uvular fricative, the Czech palatal fricative, etc. If I remember right, he concluded that the common element was that [r] is accompanied by pharyngeal constriction, and that the specific suprapharyngeal component was secondary. If this is so, there would then be no need to posit extreme retraction of the front of the tongue as being heard as pharyngeal, an explanation that I'm not comfortable with.

I don't have a copy of this article, unfortunately, and my memory may not be reliable in the details.

Thanks very much for the information about Caucasian Albanian.

Paul

> Dear friends and colleagues, many thanks for your so helpful comments on
> my little query concerning a possible 'relationship' between [sh] and [%]
> (= voiced pharyngeal stop) in loans. Let me briefly clarify a bit the
> problem: The language in question is Caucasian Albanian (CA). Till
> recently, practically nothing had been known about this language spoken in
> Northern and Western Azerbaijan between roughly 300 and 900 AD. It is said
> to have been the 'official' language of the Christian Kingdom of
> (Caucasian) Albania (300-700 AD) also used in religious service. In 1996,
> Zaza Aleksidze from Tbilisi identified the lower layers of two Palimpsest
> manuscripts found in the St. Katharine monastery on Mt. Sinai  (1975) as
> containing text in the so-called Caucasian Albanian script. So far, this
> script was known only fragmentarily (some very brief inscriptions and a
> Medieval alphabet list): The scirpt differs totally from Old Armenian and
> Old Georgian, although it clearly belongs into the 'same' context). The
> two manuscripts include some 120 pages with CA texts in their lower layers
>  that, however, are heavily erased and mostly extremely difficult to read.
> Preliminary studies done by Zaza Aleksidze supported the hypothesis that
> we have to deal with an early variant of Udi, an Southeast Caucasian
> language nowadays spoken by some 5.000 people in Northern Azerbaijan and
> in the diaspora (basically Russian and Armenia). In 2003, Jost Gippert
> (Comparative Linguistics, U Frankfurt) and I have started to decipher and
> interpret the lower layer of the Palimpsests. The bulk of the work is now
> done (it took us more than four years to decipher the sound values, to
> restore the texts, and to translate them (the CA Palimpsests will be
> published in several volumes of /Monumenta Palaegraphica Medii Aevi/,
> Series Ibero-Caucasica at Brepols (Tournhout) in 2008). The texts include
> fragments of a early Christian lectionary and fragments of the Gospel of
> John. In sum, the texts document roughly 10.000 CA word tokens (that gives
> us about 1.000 lexical entries). The language has /nothing/ to do with
> Balkan Albanian: The resemblance of the two ethnonyms is coincidendal and
> due to the Ancient Greek interpretation of the local name *Alwan (as
> albanioi). CA clearly is East Caucasian, a so-to-say 'aunt' of Modern Nizh
> Udi. Thus the Palimpsest for the first time allows to describe the earlier
> stage of an East Caucasian language (probably 500-600 AD). For more
> details see Gippert & Schulze 2007. Some remarks on the Caucasian Albanian
>  Palimpsest. In: /Iran and the Caucasus/ (11) 2007:201-212 and 
> http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/Cauc_alb.htm (Attention! Page is not
> updated!). So far the background. Now let me briefly come back to my
> original question. As I have said earlier: I have to respect Jost
> Gippert's share in the copyright of the CA data and hence cannot give
> concrete examples. But let me 'paraphrase' them: In the CA texts there are
> at least three loans from language A that are marked for a [sh] in the
> donor language: CshVC, CVrshVC, and CVrshVCVC. In CA, the loans yield the
> form CV%VC, CV%VC, and CV%VCVC respectively. The last two examples may
> suggest the hypothesis that the cluster [rsh] is changed to [%], what
> would come close to what Marie-Lucie Tarpent has suggested:  [sh] "/might
> have undergone extreme retroflexion in the borrowing language, and then be
>  interpreted as a consonant involving the extreme back of the mouth, all 
> the way to the pharynx.  The development of the manner of articulation and
> the glottal state of this new consonant could be secondary to that of the
> new place of articulation./" In fact, some of the pharyngealized vowels in
> Modern Udi (as well as in CA) probably stem from old */Vr/, although the
> pharyngeal may likewise be original/old in other words. However, the first
> example (CshVC > CV%VC) shows that the shift from [sh] to [%] happened
> without the present of [r]. Naturally, we might argue that here the shift
> has taken place in analogy to the process [rsh] > [%]. But things become
> more difficult, if we consider some original, that is 'Lezgian' CA words
> that contain [%] and that may have cognate in Modern Udi containing [s']
> (a dento-alveolar voiceless fricative [a so-called 'middle sibilant']).
> The three (?) relevant pairs do not argue in favor of the presence of
> *-rsh- in Pre-Udi/CA. Unfortunately, the data are too few to prove that
> [sh] in the donor language A is /systematically/ replaced by [%] in CA,
> but we do not have counter-examples. So, we start from the hypothesis that
> the process is quite 'regular' within the relationship between Language A
> (donor language) and CA. Well, that's just to put my question into the
> corresponding context. I will consider all your proposals in order to get
> closer to that puzzle - I guess all of them will help..... Best wishes, and
> many thanks again, Wolfgang
> 
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