Pre-Basque Phonology

[Roslyn M. Frank]

At 03:19 PM 10/1/99 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote:
>	I've heard many times [including from a couple of women named
>Maite] that Maite is an abbreviated form of Maria Teresa and tried to
>figure out how you could get Maite from that name. The closest thing I
>could think of was "Mari Tere", which are used separately in Spanish but,
>as far as I know, not together.
> 	I imagine that what may have happened was that Spanish speakers
>asked what the name meant in Spanish and the parents just threw out Maria
>Teresa because of the superficial resemblance. Although Maite is pretty
>different from Maria, there isn't much else in Spanish that's close in
>phonological terms.
>	A similar thing has happened in the US Southwest where Spanish
>Jesus is often "translated" as "Jesse", Fernando as "Freddy", Concepcion as
>"Connie", Luz as "Lucy", Angeles as "Angie" or "Angela", Jesusa as "Susie"
>or "Susan"

Obviously we have a number of different interpretations of what
happened/happens with this item. I wonder if Miguel (or someone else) could
speculate on whether the distribution of such highly reduced nicknames is
higher in Cataluyna. I'm not referring specifically to the "alleged"
reduction of Maria Teresa to Maite, but rather in general.

(An aside: now that I think about it, I do know someone from Catalunya who
calls his girlfriend "Mai".)

Phonologically speaking in other circumstances I don't think that Euskera
regularly looses the intervocalic /r/. That's my impression. I also don't
know what the relationship would be between the set of (unconscious)
phonological rules used to produce such nicknames and the set used for the
rest of the language.

Nor do I know if this is a topic that has been subjected to serious study.
Without having looked into the literature, I would suggest that what we may
be looking at is the question of whether there are different sets of rules
that are brought into play by speakers of a given language to produce items
belonging to different parts of the lexicon, e.g., phonoestetic expressions
(is that the right term?) versus "regular" words. Or stated differently, do
speakers have access to two different (although perhaps largely
overlapping) phonological repertoires that are then drawn into play by them
depending on the circumstances?

Has anyone done a cross-linguistic study of such forms? How similar are
these patterns cross-linguistically and/or what conclusions can be drawn
concerning the relationship holding between them and the standard
phonotactic rules of the same language?

For example in Euskera, as Larry has pointed out, emphasis is often
expressed not by just repeating the same word. For example, we find
<gorrigorri> "very red" (lit. "red, red"), but also there are many
instances in which the first letter of the second word/expression is turned
into an <m>, to produce compounds, e.g., <hikamika> "a falling out, tiff,
verbal fight," an
expression that I've always assumed came from <hi-ka>, from repeatedly
accusing the other person by saying "You (did this...).. You (did that)."
In this interpretation <hi> would be the second person pronoun. Actually
<hika> is often used to refer to the notion of "addressing the other in
<hi>, in the allocutive forms of the verb that that form of address requires.

A form like <esa-mesa-ka> based on the verbal stem of <esan> "to speak, to
say" refers to "gossip". Here the iterative suffix <-ka> with its often
gerundive force, is added to the compound <esamesa> to form a word in its
own right, a (de)verbal noun (?).

This last example,I believe, shows the way that a rule governing an
expressive formation (I refer merely to the addition of the <m> to the
second <esa>) in a given language can end up producing a "real" compound.
Obviously this creation is based on a real verbal stem in Euskera, i.e.,
<esa->, not on a purely phonoestetic or onomatopeic form. But the rule that
governs the insertion of the <m> comes from the "other" set of rules.

In this case the question would be, does this formation bring into play the
regular rules or are there subrules to these rules that can be accessed
which allow for expressive formations?

In short, are the two systems really as separate as they are sometimes
portrayed to be? A topic that has been brought up before on this list.

Comments?

Izan untsa,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990