Tuesday seminar at UH (fwd)

[Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 19:17:41 -1000
From: Christopher Court <court at hawaii.edu>
Subject: Re: Tuesday seminar

Abstract of Tuesday Seminar for April 18:--

	  Some problems in linguistic change and relationships
    between languages: a miscellany of observations and speculations

			Christopher Court
			Thai Program
			U of Hawaii at Manoa

Time:    12:00-1:00
Place:   St. John 11


First there will be a brief discussion of some sounds whose acquisition
seems to be widely problematic (IPA values): [r, x, h] and [#ng] (initial
"ng"); then of why #"zh" & "zh"# (initial and final "zh") in
Eng. (English) are easier to acquire than #"ng"; then of some seeming
exceptions to some seeming phonological universals--voiced obstruents
_raising_ pitch in /--V, and /h/ _raising_ pitch in /V--. Then it is
claimed that the Gmc lg.s (Germanic languages) have a common prosodic
package of syllabication-type, stress, word-demarcation charactersitics,
and intonation, and the question is raised as to whether this (a) is due
to common drift or common inheritance, (b) coheres with other aspects of
Gmc in a holistic type, and (c) can be projected back to proto-IE. Then
some details of syllabication and postvocalic /r/ in varieties of English
are touched on, as well as the (possibly fantastic-seeming) question of
whether any prosodic features of Eng. can be considered to cohere
holotypologically with absence of Clf's (classifiers)--e.g., the
lowering of pitch and stress in Eng. on old information, and/or the
subject-prominent typology (both of these seem to be absent in all the
Asian N-classifying lg.s., and cause great problems for ESL learners in SE
& E Asia). There is a brief discussion of Clf-usage & trends therein in
Thai and Khmer, and of how to interpret the lexical affinities between
Thai & Khmer (no correspondences in basic vocabulary or morphology,
hundreds of loans in one direction or the other, a seemingly shared
system of sound symbolism from which "lookalikes" can be independently
generated, apparent "word-families" cutting across Thai and Khmer, &
sometimes Chinese and/or W Austronesian as well).