Re: Etymology of the Italian surname 'Brighenti'

At 10:59:35 AM on Wednesday, September 24, 2008, tgpedersen
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 1:53:39 PM on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, tgpedersen
>> wrote:

>>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
>>> <BMScott@> wrote:

[...]

>>>> No, *you* haven't thought it through. Or if you have,
>>>> your bizarre sociolinguistic axioms make it a case of
>>>> GIGO.

>>> This habit you have of using value judgments as premises
>>> in your line of reasoning, is that something you have
>>> carried over from your day job in math? 'Oh, what a nasty
>>> number, I don't like it'?

>> That isn't a premise: it's a conclusion.

> No. A conclusion has premises.

Indeed. Which I did not trouble myself to state. Nor do I
intend to do so now: it would require a rather lengthy
essay, and it wouldn't do a bit of good anyway. I could
refer you to a good book on sociolinguistics and language
change, but that wouldn't do any good either.

> Your 'conclusion' has no premises. And a conclusion
> without premises is an opinion.

It is both a conclusion that I've reached and an opinion
that I now hold as a result of having reached it. Are you
quite finished with these silly word-games?

[...]

>>>> As should have been clear from my post, I understood
>>>> that this was your claim. And as I said, it's
>>>> implausible and unnecessary.

>>> It is clear from your post you didn't. This my proposal,
>>> chronologically:

>>> 1. Umlaut causes stem vowel /e/ > /i/ in (among all
>>> else) 2,3sg, 2pl of Gmc. class III verbs

>>> 2. In verbs with originally *-en-, the -in- forms are
>>> substituted by generalization into 1sg, 1,3pl, in the
>>> rest, -en- is similarly substituted into 2pl.

>>> 3. The -en- > -in- substitution spreads to the rest of
>>> the vocabulary.

>> I know. That's exactly what I understood you to be
>> proposing.

>>> You conflated 2. and 3.,

>> I did not. It is clear that you did not read my post
>> carefully enough.

>>> thereby labeling 2+3 a kind of umlaut which of course it
>>> isn't.

>> Indeed it isn't, and I did not say that it was.

>>> I don't 'extend i-umlaut of *e from words like *bindanã
>>> to completely unrelated words like *hringaz, but not to
>>> words like *helpanã'.

>> Obviously I'm talking about the result, not the process.
>> Your English is good enough that I sometimes forget that
>> you're not a native speaker.

> So you're criticizing the arbitrariness of a rule that
> singles out verbs in /en/ for generalization and leave out
> those in /el/.

That's only half of the problem. Not only is there no
evident reason to generalize from an exceptional subclass of
verbs, but there is no evident basis (e.g., in analogy) for
generalizing from verbs to nominals and prepositions.

> Yes, that is arbitrary, but that is exactly the same
> problem that the standard theory has in defending why
> there is a general rule /en/ > /in/, but not one /el/ >
> /il/.

So you've paid no attention to the fact that pre-nasal
raising is a natural phenomenon that occurs elsewhere; I
know of no evidence that pre-lateral raising of /e/ is
natural.

[...]

>>>> In any case, your comment was a non sequitur. First,
>>>> there are two different effects: raising of *e to *i
>>>> when followed in the same or the next syllable by a
>>>> high vowel, and raising of *e to *i when followed by a
>>>> nasal in the coda of the same syllable. The latter
>>>> occurs without the high vowel trigger, and the former
>>>> occurs without the nasal.

>>> You must have misunderstood something. This is a
>>> restatement of the traditional explanation, not a
>>> premise which supports it or disproves my alternative
>>> proposal.

>> It isn't an explanation at all: it's a description of the
>> observed facts -- you know, the ones that you're trying
>> to explain. It's a descriptively correct statement,
>> whatever the explanation of the observations may be.

>>> Circular.

>> Pfft. It's just a description, so it can't be circular.

> Nonsense. As you should know, if you have a set you can
> define it either by enumeration or by a defining function.
> There can be several of those. You use as generating
> function the rules you root for, and then you claim it's
> just a description.

Because it is, of course. A set, mathematical or otherwise,
can have more than one description. The description may
suggest a particular construction of the set, but it does
not in general *entail* a particular construction.

In this case I did not say by what mechanism the observed
effects (raising of *e to *i before tautosyllabic nasals and
raising of *e to *i when followed by a high front vowel in
the same or the next syllable) occurred; I merely said that
they are observed -- which they are. How they are
accomplished -- by distinct mechanisms that break down along
the lines of that description, or by the sequence of events
that you envision -- has no effect on the observation
itself, which is describable in precisely the terms that I
just used. Until you understand this basic fact, there's no
point continuing the discussion.

Brian