Re: [tied] Re: PIE Word Formation (1)

At 9:45:27 AM on Friday, April 7, 2006, Rob wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>> On 2006-04-05 15:58, Rob wrote:

[...]

>>> While I can readily see how word-final and/or
>>> phrase-final position can be special in languages, I'm
>>> having a harder time seeing that case with stem-final
>>> position. Is there any conclusive evidence for the
>>> latter?

>> English shows it! Isn't that conclusive enough?

> Does English show it? I'm not convinced of that yet. The
> fact that English <ng> fluctuates between [N] and [Ng] is
> interesting, but I am not completely sure as to what
> caused it.

That's a separate issue: recognizing a fact should not be
dependent on identifying its cause. In this case it doesn't
in the first instance matter *why* you get /N/ finally and
before inflectional endings but /Ng/ before derivational
endings; the fact that you do shows that in at least one
respect the stem-final position *is* treated differently,
which is precisely the claim.

> Also, if English does treat the "stem-final" position
> differently from other positions, we should expect to see
> other phonemes undergo similar alternations. [...]

It occurs to me that at one time in EModE there may have
been at least one other, involving /mb/ and /m/, before the
/b/ was lost completely. This wouldn't necessarily be
demonstrable even if true, unfortunately.

Brian