LL-L: "Phonology" LOWLANDS-L, 19.MAR.2001 (01) [E]

Tue Mar 20 00:24:26 UTC 2001

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  L O W L A N D S - L * 19.MAR.2001 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Phonology" LOWLANDS-L, 18.MAR.2001 (07) [E]

From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]

Criostoir O Ciardha wrote:
> Linking aspiration to Danish was interesting,
> considering that it will be remembered that most of
> northern England was the Danelaw and consequently the
> languages now spoken there are either strongly
> influenced by Norse or Dano-Norwegian speech patterns [...]

> It is also the case I believe
> that the strength of aspiration is used amongst native
> speakers of these varieties to differentiate between
> areas - with one area's aspiration being audibly
> different to another.

Quite likely- I know from German dialects how people delight in
highlighting the least difference in usage to contrast
themselves from the next village (or city neighborhood), and I'm
sure this is the same in the British Isles.  Interestingly, they
may keep on satirizing the other village, even after they
themselves have unconsciously adopted the new trait- we're often
unaware of the little changes we unconsciously borrow from
others.  Aspiration would be a fine candidate for a social
marker of group identity, regardless of how the innovations
arose.

> To what extent might these
> innovations or developments be spontaneous or derived
> from Norse/Danish?

I'd be reluctant to attribute similar developments in English
and Danish to contact 1100 years ago, given that aspiration is a
fairly unstable articulation (i.e. speakers tend to tinker with
it), so it would be no surprise for various varieties to develop
similarly by chance.
On the other hand, it certainly would not be impossible.  I
don't know what evidence there is for when these developments
got underway in England and Denmark.  My recollection is that an
Icelandic grammarian of the 1200's specifically described a
voiceless-aspirate vs. voiced non-aspirate contrast, but even
so, Icelandic had diverged from Danish, so that's no sure proof
on Scandinavian pronunciation, assuming it even was still fairly
uniform.
One point to consider is how developments are scattered in
England and Scotland- do they resemble Danish in the Danish
Danelaw, and Norwegian in the Norwegian-settled areas?  A strong
correlation would argue in favor of the interaction (but not
rule out Frisian or chance resemblence); a mishmash of
developments would suggest independent local innovations.
My hunch is that the various developments of aspiration happened
long after viking times, but that is just a hunch.

> And what of the influence of Frisian in the northern
> varieties of English? I remember being taken aback by
> the number of placenames incorporating "Fris-"
> (Frisian) as an element to indicate Frisian settlement
> in the Midlands of England, specifically around
> Leicestershire and south-east Nottinghamshire. Could
> any of this aspiration dissemination be attributed to
> the in-migration of other Lowland language groups into
> the Nottingham area?

Potentially-  you'd want to know how Frisian is pronounced
(where most of those immigrants from West Frisia?), and what the
likely pronunciation was back at the time of immigration, what
pronunciation was like in Nottinghamshire and in any other
varieties that influenced Nottinghamese.  That's beyond what I
know.

Stefan Israe!

----------

From: Christian A. Harder [christian at royal.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Phonology" LOWLANDS-L, 18.MAR.2001 (07) [E]

Ron, it's probably been 2 years since I've written anything for the list. I

hope I've got the procedures right, and I trust you'll let me know if I
haven't, Christian

> Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com] wrote
>
> Aspiration presumably led Old High German to shift ptk (p` t`
> k`) to [pf], [ts] <tz>, [kx] <kch> etc., as Ron surmised.  This may have
> eliminated aspiration
> from Old High German, paving the way for the binnendeutsche
> Konsonantenverdumpfung, which generally merges p/b, t/d etc.
>
> Dutch is thought to have abandoned aspiration due to French
> influence (likewise the shift of [u] to [y] etc.), and thus
> Lowland varieties derived from Dutch didn't inherited
> aspiration.
> Loss of aspiration in some west Low Saxon varieties is
> presumably another of the influences of Dutch immigrants there.

This departs from the Lowlands area by a thousand miles, plus or minus, but
in
Salzburg we do maintain p/b, t/d, and k/g as distinct phonemes (no one
could
confuse Kunst and Gunst for example), but the distinctive feature is voice,

not aspiration. I remember making fun (albeit incorrectly) of "die
Theutschn"
(the Germans) with an exageratedly aspirated t. (Of course, the real word
for
them is Daitschn.)

> Take German _Weg_ [ve:k] and _weg_ [vEk], both originally with a
> short vowel: even though the two words are clearly related,
> speakers didn't extend the lengthened vowel to the adverb.

That is true in standard German, but pronouncing the adverb with a long e
(as
in "Ge schlach di weg" [gE Slax di: ve:g] meaning "Beat it!") is something
my
wife gets after me about all the time. She says I'm misteaching the
children.

Moving several thousand more miles away from the Lowlands homeland,

> Ron wrote:
>
> This type of maximization is not uncommon, also outside Germanic, namely
> where a language has only voiceless consonants and thus has only
aspiration
> as a contrastive device.  Good examples are found among the Chinese
> languages ("dialects"), specifically in Mandarin.  Basically speaking,
the
> Chinese group of languages does not have voiced stops, and it contrasts
> only by means of aspiration or the lack of it.  (I am not counting /b-/
in
> Min [Hokkien], because it corresponds to /m-/ in other Chinese languages;

> e.g., /bæ3/ vs Mandarin /ma3/ 'horse', often believed to be derived from
> ancient /mb-/ -- Min still has the usual contrast between [p`] and [p].)
> Assumedly to maximize the contrast, many Mandarin dialects have changed
the
> aspiration puff to a fricative consonant; e.g., [p`a] > [pxa], [p`i] >
> [pCi], thus [pxa] vs [pa] (Pinyin spelling _pa_ vs _ba_), and [pCi] vs
[pi]
> (Pinyin spelling _pi_ vs _bi_).  I am not aware of this happening in the
> southern Chinese languages and have often wondered if it is due to and
made
> possible by Altaic influence in Northern China, also considering that
> Northern Mandarin has /x-/ where other varieties have /h-/.

Where we live now (Boston, Massachusetts) I hear Chinese constantly for
about
40 minutes on the subway every morning and most evenings. As far as I
understand these are Cantonese speakers. (At least predominantly;
occasionally
I hear something very different, but I can't pretend to identify it.) They
do
not have the initial /x-/ of Mandarin, but /h-/ as Ron describes. However,
their "aspirates" do sound like stop plus /x/ as in Mandarin. I have no
idea
about these folks' background, and what other elements might be playing a
role
here, but it seems to me to be a possibility that the shift from /t'-/ to
/tx-/ might be spreading.

Regards,
Christian A. Harder

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