"syllabicity"

[Patrick C. Ryan]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Rich and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Alderson <ALDERSON at xkl.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 1999 8:51 PM

> "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote, on Tue, 27 Apr 1999:

> Further, [j] is phonologically *nothing*, although *phonetically* it is (or
> may be) a "voiced palato-dorsal fricative".  Its exact phonetic
> characteristics are irrelevant to the placement of *y within the phonological
> system of PIE (understood as a set of oppositions), just as the exact
> character of *d (plain voiced stop or glottalic egressive stop) is
> irrelevant.  (The same thing is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of [w] vs. *w.)
> Thus, to argue against the patterning of the resonants on the basis of its
> possible phonetic interpretation is to miss a very big point.

My specification of the phonetic characteristics of [j] and [w] was to
suggest that they are properly fricatives of the dorsal and labial series,
and to put them in a separate class (semivowels) is misleading.

Furthermore, contrary to your assertion, they [j/w] do not pattern the same
as [m/n/l/r]. Just one example: initial stress-unaccented *nV in Sanskrit
becomes <a>; initial stress-unaccented *jV in Sanskrit does not become <a>.

[ moderator snip ]

> What happened was this:

> 1.  An original three-vowel system /i u a/, with length, developed allophonic
> variants [& O:] of /a/ under lengthening processes.  Cowgill argued this as
> the source of Brugmann's Law in Sanskrit in a paper presented at the LSA in
> the early 70's; it solved the *e/*o problem for me, so I have adopted it.

[ moderator snip ]

You are, of course, free to *believe* anything you wish but just the first
premise in this description is untenable because unprovable: an original /i
u a/.

>>Pat writes:

>>IMHO, this is incorrect. If we accept Trask's definition of a phoneme as
>>"the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning" and restrict
>>"meaning" to "semantic difference" vs. grammatical difference, then a
>>language in which CaC, CeC, CiC, CoC, CuC, etc. represent different
>>grammatical stems of a root CVC, which has *one*, meaning, then the
>>"syllabicity" in the root makes no difference, and hence cannot be considered
>>"phonemic".

> But this is the very point I was making:  The definition you cite from Trask
> is structuralist, rather than psychological, and not the definition of the
> phoneme used by Natural Phonology.  Further, even in a structuralist
> definition, one is not allowed to restrict the word "meaning" as you wish to
> do, and so your argument for a "non-phonemic vowel" falls apart.

I think you may be a bit overly "school"-oriented. I still that Lehmann was
under no obligation to be consistently structuralist; and I do not feel a
similar restraint myself.

>>But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with
>>the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was
>>monovocalic (at least, phonemically).

>>Anything other than <Ca> in Sanskrit is a result of <Ca> + <H>, <w>, or <y>,
>>or a combination thereof. That is why Sanskrit does not bother to indicate an
>><Ca> in its writing system (only <C>). Only combinations of <Ca> + <?> *need*
>>to be indicated.

> Sanskrit was never monovocalic, phonologically speaking.

I disagree, strongly.

> There is more than one source, for example, of [e:]--see, for example, _dive
> dive_ "from day to day", where the first _dive_ is the expected sandhi
> variant of the ablative _divas_ "from (a) day".  Thus, again, your analysis
> fails to explain the facts.

In my opinion, this analysis of _dive dive_ is totally erroneous. This is
clearly a reduplicated dative.

Also, I am curious if you can cite a non-arguable ablative in -as that
becomes -e: in sandhi?

Frankly, I find -as in sandhi becoming -e: simply incredible.

Pat

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