Re: 'Vocalic Theory'

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 3:24 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] RE: 'Vocalic Theory'


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

[Moderatorial comment:
Can you not persuade your e-mail agent to insert (in-band) quotation
marking? Having to add marking when replying to your messages
infuriates several members. - RW.]

***

No one ever complained about this when I was using .html, which is much more
convenient.

Should I go back to .html?

Otherwise, I am not sure I could persuade AT&T-Yahoo! of anything.

But if you or anyone else knows how to accomplish this, I will be glad to
cooperate.

***

> From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" wrote:
>> > From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@>

> <snip>
<unsnip, reformat and repair>
>>> I cannot speak to Dutch umlaut resistance except to say in a
>>> general way that some groups of speakers seem willing to allowing
>>> following vowel quality to be anticipated in the primary vowel,
>>> and some do not. To me, it is a physical thing else all languages
>>> would have a brand of vowel harmony - which they do not.
</unsnip>

>> Note that they all allowed short vowels to be umlauted.

> Who is 'they all'? There is no obvious antecedent.

Groups of speakers [of (pre-)Dutch]

> Are you saying that Dutch allows short vowels but not long vowels
> to undergo umlaut?

Yes. Miguel also pointed out that some dialects of Dutch also allow
long vowels to undergo umlaut.

***

Well, that takes most of the wind out of the sails, does it not?

***

>> There is one example where laryngeal colouring fully affected short
>> vowels but only partially long vowels - lamedh guttural stems in
>> Classical Hebrew.

<Examples snipped - it's in
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/56337 .>

(Quoted post re-ordered for better flow.)
> I do not know enough about Hebrew to really grasp your point.

I simplify and explain below.

Essentially, if the final consonant of a root was a guttural consonant
(H, h, `) and was word final, short vowels before it were coloured to
/a/, while long vowels before it were broken - /i:/ > /i:a/, /u:/ >
/u:a/, /e:/ > /e:a/, /o:/ > /o:a/. This colouring is truly laryngeal
colouring, and in this case, laryngeal colouring does not affect the
whole of a long vowel.

***

I understand your point now; and it is a good one. Not quite conclusive but
interesting.

***


>> Long vowels are 'broken' rather than coloured, but generally such
>> breaking can be 'smoothed' away [e.g. Anglian smoothing in
>> Old English - JRW]. Had this happened in Hebrew, we
>> would have had laryngeal colouring of short vowels but no effect on
>> long vowels. As it is, we get the breaking effectively known as
>> furtive pathah rather than full colouring.

Now here's a thought. Perhaps breaking once occurred before gutturals
in open syllables, only to be smoothed away.

***

This is, in essence, Miguel's proposal (I think); and I reject it because no
evidence is no evidence. The smoothing destroys the evidence of the process.

I cannot understand why both of you resist my semantic proposal. It makes so
much sense because we see initial *a: in Pokorny usually always as *a:/a.
Necessary, I think, because different daughter languages had different
semantically competitive environments.

Patrick


***

>> Is it possible to have a phonemic analysis where furtive pathah is
>> purely an allophonic effect? If so, we could claim an even better
>> analogy to PIE.

Richard.