conditioning of Uto-Aztecan *p in Nahuatl

[Alexander Vovin]

Dear Nathan,

Very roughly speaking, but nouns and verbs behave very differently in this
respect in Japanese. Even within the verbal paradigm, older
grammaticalizations are different from more recent, although they can be
traced to very similar phonological forms, e,g., the paradigmaic form of
the verb yom- 'to count/read'

                                         Old Japanese        Late Middle
Japanese                         Modern Japanese
perfective                          yo2mi1taru            yomitaru
                                             yoNda
desiderative                      _____
yomitai                                                yomitai

Desiderative is much younger form than the perfective, and although both
are essentially identical phonologically. they show two very different
ref;exes in MJ.

Hope this helps,

Sasha


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 12:34 AM, Nathan Hill <nathanwhill at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Historical Linguists,
>
> In a paper about Tibetan I am criticizing someone for proposing that
> the same segment became one thing in nouns and another thing in verbs.
> My neogrammarian heart tells me that sound changes are aware of
> phonetic environments only and not part of speech categories. Such a
> thing is thus only possible if verbs are phonetically different than
> nouns in a systematic way (which is of course possible).
>
> Anyhow, a reviewer tells me that proto-Uto-Aztecan initial *p becomes
> zero in Nahuatl nouns but is preserved in verbs and cites the pair
> (.-tl "water" vs -p.ca "to wash"). The reviewer does not cite a
> discussion of this and I am totally at sea in the Uto-Aztecan
> literature. But, if this is an uncontroversial part of Uto-Aztecan
> historical phonology surely it has given rise to the same
> methodological concerns that I raise (sound change should apply
> blindly).
>
> I would be very grateful for any discussion of this or advice on
> treatments of this question in literature.
>
> with gratitude,
> Nathan
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>



-- 

Alexander Vovin
Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA
========================
iustitiam magni facite, infirmos protegite
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