BL and GL initials.

[Rankin, Robert L.]

Hi Bruce,

I think you must be catching up on a lot of back email.  :-)

As you get more up-to-date I think you'll find the answers to all your questions about these clusters.  The back-and-forth went on for quite some time.  I collected all vocabulary from Dakota, Omaha, Ponca, Osage, Kansa and Quapaw that has a reflex of Mississippi Valley Siouan GL or BL.  Accent in these words DOES in fact fall on the initial syllable in all but Dakotan, exactly as you predict it should.  It's only Dakota that's changed.

Best,

Bob
________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of shokooh Ingham [shokoohbanou at YAHOO.CO.UK]
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2013 2:38 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Locatives and wa- problems.

I don't get that.  If gluha and bluha were three syllables, wouldn't the stress be glUha and blUha rather than gluhA and bluhA?
Bruce

________________________________
From: "Rankin, Robert L." <rankin at KU.EDU>
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Sent: Monday, 9 September 2013, 16:15
Subject: Re: Locatives and wa- problems.

I think you'd be wrong.  By accent placement rules and by morphological analysis the GL and BL clusters count as two syllables.  The little phonetic tics are immaterial.  Fortunately or unfortunately the Gs all go back to full syllables, mostly KI while the Bs of the BL clusters all go back to WA or WI.  All were morphemes also.  Ordinarily the prehistory of these things might not matter, but the accent rules still seem to be able to treat the Gs and Bs as morae for purposes of assigning stress synchronically.  This is especially true of Hochunk which, assuming Ken Miner was right, is a mora counting language.  I'm guessing that Dakotan is too.
________________________________

> Phonetically, there is a schwa in there.  But phonologically, I would count glV- as one syllable.

Actually, that's backwards.  Phonetically BLV and GLV may form single syllables but phonologically they count as two for the reasons cited above.  \

It gets worse, of course.  If the structure is CVglV the syllabification rules for Siouan languages assign the /g/ phonetically to the second syllable along with the initial member of all other CC clusters.  I remember telling an Australian linguist that and being laughed at because he believed that syllable boundaries could be derived from a "universal."  It's all very messy, but it's a fact that CL clusters can behave as two syllables for various phonological purposes and perhaps as single syllables for yet other purposes.


Bob


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