Re: [tied] Re: IE & linguistic complexity

In Portuguese this occurs stella > estrela "star" spatha > espada "sword" speculum > espelho "mirror". In modern accent, there's almost a revertion : estrela is spelled "istrela", in some dialectal variations almost "strela". In Rio de Janeiro we palatalize the s before consonants, so we speak "ishtrela" (the "i" is so short that is almost shtrela).

It's curious the sp-, sk- st- received a prothetical vowel in Western Romance, not in Germanic, nor Slavic, Celtic, Greek or Baltic. The prothesis also occurs, as you said, in Hungarian (Stephanos > Istvan) and (correct if I'm wrong) in Albanian.

Other interesting "regional phonology" is the distribuition of interdental sounds "th" and "dh" : English, Norse, Gothic, Spanish, Euskaran, Irish, Welsh, Modern Greek, Toscan Italian, Albanian, Proto-Italic. It doesnt exist in German, standard Italian, French, Hungarian, Portuguese (it's very difficult to us pronnounce the English "th", badly pronnounced as "s" or "f"). Someone explains the th in Spanish (only in Spain, not in Americas) as an influence of Euskaran, as Toscanian can be an influence of Etruscan.

The "kh" sound also had particular distribuition (Slavic, Spanish, German, Greek, Toscanian Italian, Old Hungarian, Proto-Italic)

Joao SL

Rio

----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 6:37 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: IE & linguistic complexity

Any explanation based on anecdotal "evidence" rather than empirical findings is a priori suspect. The occurrence of "regional phonologies" is a familiar but irritatingly neglected phenomenon. It deserves a lot more attention that it's received so far, also because it is of serious relevance to the discussion of "areal versus genetic". It would be a good idea to compile an inventory of such areal traits and map them -- e.g. to see if they can be aligned with anything interesting. Are they biologically based? I dunno.

As for IE curiosities, we have for instance the special status of /sp/, /st/ and /sk/, which tend to behave (in phonotactic terms) like single segments. They may be root-initial and syllable-initial. In English, for example, they can combine with liquids word-initially, forming the only acceptable CCC onsets in the language (splash, street, scratch), /st/ occurs freely in grammatical morphemes and root-finally after long vowels (roast, paste, feast), and in OE poetry each cluster alliterates as an indivisible whole (streamas styredon, whereas alliterations like st... s... or st... sp... are ruled out -- no normal clusters behave like this, e.g. t... tr... or even s... sn... are OK). On the peripheries of Indo-Europia they show typologically unmarked behaviour (substratal influence?), e.g. prothesis with resyllabification (sT > esT) in western Romance (a few weeks ago I heard English-espeaking guides in Spain refer consistently to "estone", "esquare" and "Espain", which proves that the process remains productive AD 2000); even Hittite seems to have developed a prothetic vowel (sT > isT). Cf. Hungarian sT > iST (S = "sh", spelt <s>) in loanwords from IE languages.

Though exceptional treatment of sT clusters is not completely unknown in other families, it is nevertheless extremely rare and therefore typologically odd, almost like the South African clicks or the Australian lack of fricatives, or the survival of breathy stops in India.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----

From: John Croft

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 5:53 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: IE & linguistic complexity

On a related point, my lecturer in Aboriginal linguistics at the University of Western Australia in 1970 claimed that the loss of frictives and sibilants from Aboriginal Languages was due to the widespread condition of Yaws, which leads to a constant sub-auditory hiss, making these phonemes inaudible. I tend to be suspeicious of his explanation but would be interested in what people on this list think. Can phonemes change for this kind of reason? Are there any PIE examples? (*TH, *DH for example).