Various questions about language

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LeCiagoPanda
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Various questions about language

Post by LeCiagoPanda »

I have a few questions about language and sound shifts, I was wondering if you guys would be able to help answer them.

Do languages *have* to change over a certain period of time? Also, are certain types (e.g. an agglutinative language, or one containing a certain phonemic inventory) of languages less likely than others to undergo (certain) sound changes? (an example would be if a language specifically avoided fully palatalizing and fronting a series of palatalized velars because post-alveolar consonants were common, so such a sound change would cause confusion)

One thing that's been bugging me is the viability of certain sound changes when it comes to making conlangs. Would some languages not undergo a certain sound change specifically because of their phonemes? An example would be Romanian vowel breaking: why did Latin vowels diphthongize differently in Romanian when compared to other Romance languages (cf. Rm. moarte vs Sp. muerte vs It. morte)? Or, for example, is there a phonemic or phonological reason why did Italian not diphthongize said vowels in closed syllables, whereas Spanish did? And in Latin, early Latin analysed Ancient Greek upsilon as "u" (cf. bursa) while later it was analyzed as "y", eventually coming to be pronounced the same as "i". Is there a phonological basis for this? Or was this simply a result of changing transliteration methods, or is there yet another reason?

Do similar sound changes have to be separated by a certain amount of time before happening again? Could you have two waves of palatalization, for example, in a short time, with no other intervening sound change?

Were a language to have multiple near-homophones or minimal pairs, would it start focusing on sound changes aimed at dissimilating the similar words (in the same way Tengwar is arguably unrealistic due to a natural human tendency to distinguish between letter shapes)?

Finally, what are some attested sound changes which complicate things? I always hear that languages are *not* becoming simpler, yet the majority of sound change I read about seems to be some kind of lenition, or loss of a case or gender.

I know it's a lot but I'd appreciate your guy's viewpoints! :D

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Vuvuzela »

LeCiagoPanda wrote:Do languages *have* to change over a certain period of time?
Well, some languages change more slowly others over a similar period of time, but I'm not sure I've heard of a language being completely static over many generations.
LeCiagoPanda wrote:Also, are certain types (e.g. an agglutinative language,
If you mean regular sound change? No, I don't think agglutinative languages behave much differently from, say, isolating ones, or fusional ones. When a sound change disrupts a paradigm, it can be fixed by analogy.
LeCiagoPanda wrote:or one containing a certain phonemic inventory)
Yes. Sound changes are often explained as attempts to "balance" a phoneme inventory. This is easy to see in things like chain shifts, where when one sound changes into another it leaves a "gap" in the inventory, which is filled by changing some other sound into something like the first sound, leaving another "gap", which can be later filled by turning a third sound into something similar to the second one.
LeCiagoPanda wrote:an example would be if a language specifically avoided fully palatalizing and fronting a series of palatalized velars because post-alveolar consonants were common, so such a sound change would cause confusion
Not necessarily. I'm not sure whether palatalisation is more or less common in languages which already have a palatal/postalveolar series, though.
LeCiagoPanda wrote:Finally, what are some attested sound changes which complicate things? I always hear that languages are *not* becoming simpler, yet the majority of sound change I read about seems to be some kind of lenition, or loss of a case or gender
Not exactly a sound change, but grammaticalisation balances out the loss of marking.
As for the reason languages don't become dominated by lenis consonants, despite lenition being more common than fortition, I don't know. I've always assumed it was because while fortis consonants were more likely to become lenis than vice-versa, lenis consonants are more likely to disappear, balancing things out. As to why words don't become shorter on the whole, I'd guess that borrowing, derivation and compounding are the culprits.

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by R.Rusanov »

The icelandic shtick is BS. Grammatically and spelling-wise the language has remained conservative but phonologically speaking - which this thread is about I gather - it's diverged IMMENSELY from its old Norse ancestry.

Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Drydic »

LeCiagoPanda wrote:I have a few questions about language and sound shifts, I was wondering if you guys would be able to help answer them.

Do languages *have* to change over a certain period of time?
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, but there are no fixed rates. Lithuanian, a language fairly conservative in retaining grammatical features (with reference to our best guess at PIE's setup, based on its oldest attested descendants), has had as much time from PIE as has Bengali, which has very little retained grammatical features from the common protolanguage.
Also, are certain types (e.g. an agglutinative language, or one containing a certain phonemic inventory) of languages less likely than others to undergo (certain) sound changes? (an example would be if a language specifically avoided fully palatalizing and fronting a series of palatalized velars because post-alveolar consonants were common, so such a sound change would cause confusion)
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, not really. Take a look at Dravidian plosive series sometime to see why that isn't an assumption that can be made.
One thing that's been bugging me is the viability of certain sound changes when it comes to making conlangs. Would some languages not undergo a certain sound change specifically because of their phonemes? An example would be Romanian vowel breaking: why did Latin vowels diphthongize differently in Romanian when compared to other Romance languages (cf. Rm. moarte vs Sp. muerte vs It. morte)? Or, for example, is there a phonemic or phonological reason why did Italian not diphthongize said vowels in closed syllables, whereas Spanish did?
You seem to be asking 'why are different languages different?', which isn't a terribly useful question to ask. But, to answer it directly, it's because the speakers of the different populations did things differently.
And in Latin, early Latin analysed Ancient Greek upsilon as "u" (cf. bursa) while later it was analyzed as "y", eventually coming to be pronounced the same as "i". Is there a phonological basis for this? Or was this simply a result of changing transliteration methods, or is there yet another reason?
Because the Greek sound's pronunciation changed.

Were a language to have multiple near-homophones or minimal pairs, would it start focusing on sound changes aimed at dissimilating the similar words (in the same way Tengwar is arguably unrealistic due to a natural human tendency to distinguish between letter shapes)?
It could, but it sure doesn't have to. Look at how many tens of thousands of homophonous monosyllables Mandarin Chinese has. Note however that while on some level they usually have independent meanings, the majority of Mandarin monosyllables do not appear alone, but with other words (or classifiers) in compounds.
Finally, what are some attested sound changes which complicate things? I always hear that languages are *not* becoming simpler, yet the majority of sound change I read about seems to be some kind of lenition, or loss of a case or gender.
You're looking at it wrong. Sound change isn't the only way languages change. Grammaticalization (if you're a native English speaker think about the differences between have and hafta/hasta (no, they are not the same as have)) for one, compounding, extension (that is just adding on syllables which don't necessarily have any particular meaning), and derivation all are ways to counter the wearing down that sound changes often produce.


Also Rusanov, you fail at Semitic languages forever. While your made-up example is not directly attested (though there are Arabic dialects which unconditionally shift k to č), what you're talking about happens in them all the fucking time. Look at the spirantization rules for Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew sometime if you don't believe me.
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Terra »

Finally, what are some attested sound changes which complicate things? I always hear that languages are *not* becoming simpler, yet the majority of sound change I read about seems to be some kind of lenition, or loss of a case or gender.
Why do you assume that losing a case or gender makes things simpler? When Vulgar Latin lost Classical Latin's neuter case, all the neuter nouns had to be reclassified as either masculine or feminine. Sometimes it couldn't decisively decide and the word ended up with different genders in different languages. Check out this link for examples: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=295953

If a case is lost, there's a possibility that the meaning will be taken over by something else instead (like a preposition, postposition, or verb). And even if the new thing becomes used 99% of the time, there's bound to be some archaic phrase/terminology that still uses the extinct case.

Why can't lenition/elision wreck havoc? Take Spanish "caer" from Latin "cadere". Intervocal "d" elided (and Intervocal "t" lenited). What if there was already a word "caer"?, then the two words merge, causing confusion. If they were close enough semantically, they might become to be perceived as the same word. (Recall English "sit" vs "set", and how they merge in some dialects, and how even in dialects that don't merge them, people sometimes use "sit" when prescriptivists say that they should use "set".) Or what if two vowels in sequence violated some rule of syllable structure? The lenition and elision might just destroy that rule, or maybe the rule will triumph and force the words to insert some consonant in between the vowels.

Or, let's say for example that there was some language where the past-tense morpheme /ta/ gets prefixed to the verb, and the negative morpheme /na/ gets prefixed before that, if present. So when intervocalic lenition (VtV > VdV) comes around, it'll affect negative past-tense verbs, but not positive past-tense verbs. Thus, sometimes the past-tense morpheme will appear as /ta/, and sometimes /da/ (assuming that the language has phonemic voicing contrast in plosives).

Before:
sta : stands
ta-sta : stood
na-sta : doesn't stand
na-ta-sta : didn't stand

After:
sta
ta-sta
na-sta
na-da-sta

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Gulliver »

LeCiagoPanda wrote:IDo languages *have* to change over a certain period of time? Also, are certain types (e.g. an agglutinative language, or one containing a certain phonemic inventory) of languages less likely than others to undergo (certain) sound changes? (an example would be if a language specifically avoided fully palatalizing and fronting a series of palatalized velars because post-alveolar consonants were common, so such a sound change would cause confusion)
From what I've read, the kind of language it is doesn't matter so much as the circumstances in which is is spoken. See Milroy & Milroy (Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Sep., 1985), pp. 339-384).
LeCiagoPanda wrote:Were a language to have multiple near-homophones or minimal pairs, would it start focusing on sound changes aimed at dissimilating the similar words (in the same way Tengwar is arguably unrealistic due to a natural human tendency to distinguish between letter shapes)?
I think Tengwar isn't that bad. Humans rely on context for understanding quite a lot. It's also not a human writing system, in-universe, and Tolkein's elves are explicitly magical in their art and craftsmanship so it's conceivable that Tengwar is readable because the writer wants it to be read. Compare quickly written h, n and m, or a and d; or Medieval Latin where you basically have to count the down-strokes to distinguish many letters until you get the flow of it. Or Arabic and Hebrew where vowels are often omitted. Or Kanji where one character could be part of one of several words. Context helps a lot. Humans have a natural tendency to do whatever is least hassle, writers included.

But, back to sound changes, near homophones are again distinguished partly by context and we take a lot of short-cuts when we speak (assimilation etc). I don't think distinguishing homophones is a priority in sound changes. An example of this is the loss of /θ/ and /ð/ in some dialects of English, replaced by /f/ and /v/ or /t/ and /d/. This creates homophones, rather than reduces them. That's a quick example off the top of my head, and doesn't prove anything, but I don't think there are any universal rules for it really.

This (pdf) might be an interesting read. It's 36 pages long and I've only skimmed it, but talks about sound change predictability. It's worth reading the introduction and conclusion.

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Re: Various questions about language

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I don't think Tengwar is necessarily unrealistic. There is real historical precedent for highly ambiguous scripts. Book Pahlavi comes to mind. At least Tengwar clearly differentiates the letters.

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Vuvuzela »

Also cramming 28 consonants into 18 or 15 letters, and not marking short vowels or gemination works just fine.

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by linguoboy »

R.Rusanov wrote:Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
"Many people"? Biblical Hebrew is just lousy with lenition. Historically allophonic, borrowings have made it phonemic.

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Re: Various questions about language

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clawgrip wrote:I don't think Tengwar is necessarily unrealistic. There is real historical precedent for highly ambiguous scripts. Book Pahlavi comes to mind. At least Tengwar clearly differentiates the letters.
Yes. Tengwar, for what it's worth, has far clearer letter shapes than, say, Balinese. Also do note that in-world, Tengwar was invented by a single person and is not a naturally evolved writing system. Compare things like the Armenian or Glagolitic alphabets and I would argue that Tengwar gets a pass.
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Xephyr »

Terra wrote:Why do you assume that losing a case or gender makes things simpler?
He's right, though.
When Vulgar Latin lost Classical Latin's neuter case, all the neuter nouns had to be reclassified as either masculine or feminine. Sometimes it couldn't decisively decide and the word ended up with different genders in different languages. Check out this link for examples: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=295953
How does that follow? Latin already had words with unpredictable genders (4th and 5th declension). Only after it lost the neuter, it only had two genders to deal with. If that's not simplification, I don't know what is.
If a case is lost, there's a possibility that the meaning will be taken over by something else instead (like a preposition, postposition, or verb). And even if the new thing becomes used 99% of the time, there's bound to be some archaic phrase/terminology that still uses the extinct case.
So the language doesn't lose any theta roles, but it now marks it in a more regular and predictable way. Doesn't have to worry about declension or gender or irregular forms. And again, Latin already had archaic phrases, like the old genitive ending in "paterfamilias".
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by linguoboy »

Xephyr wrote:
When Vulgar Latin lost Classical Latin's neuter case, all the neuter nouns had to be reclassified as either masculine or feminine. Sometimes it couldn't decisively decide and the word ended up with different genders in different languages. Check out this link for examples: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=295953
How does that follow? Latin already had words with unpredictable genders (4th and 5th declension). Only after it lost the neuter, it only had two genders to deal with. If that's not simplification, I don't know what is.
You do, however, end up with a new class of "irregular" nouns which are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, e.g. l'uovo rosso, pl. le uova rosse. You also end up with plurals of both genders, e.g. il cervello "the brain", i cervelli "the brains", le cervella "the brain matter; the brains [in a culinary sense]". Overall, the system could be said to be "simpler", but it's not as straightforward as in a language that never had a third gender to begin with.

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Terra »

How does that follow? Latin already had words with unpredictable genders (4th and 5th declension). Only after it lost the neuter, it only had two genders to deal with. If that's not simplification, I don't know what is.
"simple" is not clearly defined. If "simple" means only "Conveys less information rather than more.", then yes, two genders is always simpler than three. But the unpredictability of re-categorization of a formerly neuter noun as masculine or feminine suggests that the noun doesn't fit well and seems strange in either. If before it seemed obviously neuter, is this (people struggling to assign/detect a gender) really a simplification?
So the language doesn't lose any theta roles, but it now marks it in a more regular and predictable way. Doesn't have to worry about declension or gender or irregular forms. And again, Latin already had archaic phrases, like the old genitive ending in "paterfamilias".
Having to memorize new archaic phrases isn't a complexity? Yes, some things got simpler, but others complexer. But in all, is it less to memorize than the old rules? It depends on how many archaic phrases and old rules there are, and that it makes sense to quantify them in this way. (Do we even know how rules, phrases, words, etc are stored in the brain?)

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Hallow XIII »

[17:30] <H13> in a way language change is simply the erosion of words to the point at which they have to start sticking together again until they start eroding ad infinitum [/supersimplification]
[17:32] <Drydic> that may be a supersimplification but it's damn good idea to start with as a working hypothesis for conlanging
The point is, the morphology of a language does tend to get simpler as time goes on, and information is outsourced to other features, like intonation and syntax. But at some point, the erosion will be so complete that in order to retain clear communication elements have to reagglutinate, the best example for which, I suppose, is modern-day Mandarin.

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Language drift, in any case, is pretty cyclic, and generally all human languages have the same expressive power. And also, just because language complexity is not expressed through morphology doesn't mean it's not there.
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by R.Rusanov »

linguoboy wrote:
R.Rusanov wrote:Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
"Many people"? Biblical Hebrew is just lousy with lenition. Historically allophonic, borrowings have made it phonemic.
There's a reason people reference Biblical Hebrew in these kinds of arguments and that's that that system was highly unstable for precisely the reasons I described and does not exist in modern Hebrew.
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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Ser »

Isn't ""Biblical"" Hebrew just Hebrew read with a 7th c. Aramaic accent, with 7th c. Aramaic lenition? Either way Aramaic had allophonic consonant lenition so that doesn't invalidate the point.

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by Nortaneous »

Vuvuzela wrote:Also cramming 28 consonants into 18 or 15 letters, and not marking short vowels or gemination works just fine.
also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Futhark
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Re: Various questions about language

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Oh my God. I do not even have the time to deal with all this.
R.Rusanov wrote: Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
Um. Where did you get any of this information from?

/dZ/,/Z/ in Arabic came from palatalization of /g/, and in fact I know someone with [gʲ] in his spoken dialect.

imd of Arabic palatalizes /k/ in the lowest register:

tɛħki --> teħtʃi
ki:fak --> tʃi:fatʃ
kɛm --> tʃɛm
kari:m --> tʃari:m

And if it matters to you that /k/ is always palatalized in this register, I met an Iraqi lady a few weeks ago who palatalized /k/ only by front vowels.

There's also cases of words with the same root having consonants differ depending on their form. I obviously can't demonstrate this with /k/ because it is always palatalized.
muqatˤtˤaʕ --> mqatˤtˤaʕ
inqatˤiʕ --> inkatˤiʕ

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Re: Various questions about language

Post by R.Rusanov »

I distinctly recall reading such a thing online, on the website of Fink, Rosenfelder, Rye or one of the other linguists with a website. Or maybe language hat. Or language log. Anyway I recall reading it somewhere so that's where I got the information from.
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Re: Various questions about language

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Maybe you misread or misrelayed the information.

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Re: Various questions about language

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R.Rusanov wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
R.Rusanov wrote:Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
"Many people"? Biblical Hebrew is just lousy with lenition. Historically allophonic, borrowings have made it phonemic.
There's a reason people reference Biblical Hebrew in these kinds of arguments and that's that that system was highly unstable for precisely the reasons I described and does not exist in modern Hebrew.
Nonsense. Modern Hebrew still has an alternation between b~v, k~x and p~f. The reason some of the former alternations (g~ɣ, d~ð, t~θ) don't exist in Modern Hebrew is because the majority of the revivers of Hebrew spoke a language that didn't have those lenited sounds, not because of some inherent instability in the system. Some liturgical Mizrahi pronunciations don't have b~v, for example, for precisely the same reasons—the ambient language, Arabic, doesn't have [v].

biḳéš ביקש BYḲŠ "he asked for" vs. mevaḳéš מבקש MBḲŠ "asks for"
kotév כותב KWTB "writes" vs. extóv אכתוב ʔKTWB "I will write"
nafál נפל NPL "he fell" vs. yipól יפול YPWL "he will fall"

If you want to see how all kinds of crazy sound changes in the consonants affect the triliteral root system, just take a look at some Neo-Aramaic dialects.

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Re: Various questions about language

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R.Rusanov wrote:I distinctly recall reading such a thing online, on the website of Fink, Rosenfelder, Rye or one of the other linguists with a website. Or maybe language hat. Or language log. Anyway I recall reading it somewhere so that's where I got the information from.
You do realize that Rosenfelder is Zompist, right?
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Re: Various questions about language

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Zayk wrote:Oh my God. I do not even have the time to deal with all this.
R.Rusanov wrote: Also many people hypothesize the reason Semitic consonants are resistant to processes like lenition and palatalization, and in some cases have even reversed them, is because of the root grammar. A stem KTB (for example) could have various forms such as Katab and Ketib but if they palatalized to Katab and Chetib the second would be very hard to understand as a manifestation of the KTB root in rapid speech than as some hypothetical ČTB.
Um. Where did you get any of this information from?

/dZ/,/Z/ in Arabic came from palatalization of /g/, and in fact I know someone with [gʲ] in his spoken dialect.

imd of Arabic palatalizes /k/ in the lowest register:

tɛħki --> teħtʃi
ki:fak --> tʃi:fatʃ
kɛm --> tʃɛm
kari:m --> tʃari:m

And if it matters to you that /k/ is always palatalized in this register, I met an Iraqi lady a few weeks ago who palatalized /k/ only by front vowels.

There's also cases of words with the same root having consonants differ depending on their form. I obviously can't demonstrate this with /k/ because it is always palatalized.
muqatˤtˤaʕ --> mqatˤtˤaʕ
inqatˤiʕ --> inkatˤiʕ
Gulf dialects have even further palatalisation. /dZ/ -> /j/, and sometimes even /q/ -> /g/ -> /dZ/:

jum3a -> yim3a
khaarij -> khaariy
muqaabil -> mjaabil
qaasim -> jaasim

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