Re: -l > -w

From: Alexander Stolbov
Message: 850
Date: 2000-01-11

----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 12:55 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Odp: -l > -w

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2000 4:30 PM
Subject: [cybalist] -l > -w

The transiton -l>-w is not uncommon. Germanic -old/-olt/-ald/-alt > -oud/-out is typical for Dutch (only before -d and -t). It also appeared (at the same time? cf. bilinguism in the Franconian kingdom?) in old French in a wider context, eg, her(w)ald>héraut, cheval/chevaux, al>au, del>du, etc.  Portugese also shows a weakeing or loss" of -l.  Portugese & French are the Romance langages with the largest stress, and both languages show nasalisation. I wonder if these phenomena might be related?        Marc
Yes, they ARE related. Nasalisation results from the vocalisation of syllable-final nasals. Liquid/nasal vocalisation is a special case of the more general tendency to weaken syllable codas (the coda is the final, consonantal constituent of a syllable). In most dialects of British English the same tendency is responsible for the loss of postvocalic R (as in pork, here or earth. At the end of Middle English postvocalic velar fricatives (spelt gh) were lost in the same way. In French, a few centuries ago, most stops underwent deletion word-finally (as in mont, chaud, blanc). In Proto-Slavic vowel nasalisation cooccurred with the loss of syllable-final obstruents (the result was the so-called "law of open syllables", e.g. *sup-nos 'sleep, dream' > *su-nu). The tendency is in fact universal (coda consonants are "naturally" weaker than syllable-initial ones), and a favourable combination of phonological factors may trigger it off in any language. Strong stress IS favourable to it because it amplifies the initial part (first "mora") of a stressed syllable at the expense of the final part.
 
Piotr
 
"The tendency is in fact universal" - does it mean that average length of words in all the languages (or in successions of daughter languages) progressively decreases through centuries and millenia? I doubt. Maybe, the shorter becomes a word the higher is its ability to form new complex words (adding affixes or combining with other roots)? Am I right? Are there any statistical investigations in this field?
 
Alexander