Dorsey's Law

[ROOD DAVID S]

A very quick answer which someone else will probably elaborate on:
Winnebago speakers do treat the Dorsey's law sequences as single syllables
for purposes of assigning stress.  Stress is normally on the first or
second syllable of non-Dorsey's law words, but on the second or third for
Dorsey's law forms.  I'm sure Ken Miner has written this up in detail
somewhere.
	David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Nancy E Hall wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 	I am writing a dissertation on epenthetic vowels, and have a few
> questions about those that are inserted by 'Dorsey's Law' in Winnebago and
> other Siouan languages.
>
> 1. 	Are there any examples of loanwords that have undergone Dorsey's Law?
> (I'm looking for evidence that it's synchronically productive).
>
> 2. There's a similar-looking process of copy-vowel epenthesis between
> sonorants and obstruents in Scots Gaelic:
>
> /tarv/ -> [tarav]
> /merg/ -> [mereg]
> etc.
>
> (similar conditioning environment to Dorsey's Law, except that the
> sonorant and obstruent are in the opposite order)
> 	An interesting thing about the Scots Gaelic process is that native
> speakers seem to find the resulting sequence ([tarav]) monosyllabic in
> some respects- they have difficulty pausing within it, sing it on one
> note, count it as one syllable when asked to count the syllables of a
> word, etc.
> 	Does anyone know how native speakers view Dorsey's Law segments?
> Have any tests for intuitions about syllabicity been tried?
>
> Nancy
>