Re: [tied] gwen etymology

>[Of diacritics:] Yes, I see.  I suppose I just don't write them out enough, at least when communicating via 'puter, to know how to do it.  (I usually write the marks and things by hand, or at least have the opportunity to print it out first...)

 

We have developed (or rather are still developing) a rough eMail-friendly system. I'm looking forward to a time when Unicode (or some other future encoding standard) becomes really universal and renders all makeshift transcriptions obsolete.

>I assumed the dot or carat or whatever the particular spelling convention was meant it was a fricative (I think...).  So they both mean that / the same thing?

 

 

Within Slavic, <z.> and <z^> stand for the same "chronophoneme" (similar developments of the same Proto-Slavic sound, even if the actual phonetic realisation varies a little from language to language). Polish <s'> is pronounced exactly like Sanskrit <s'> -- a palatal sound par excellence -- but Russian <s'> is a palatal-coloured dental fricative. Sanskrit <s.> is roughly the same as Polish <sz>, Hungarian <s>, Czech <s^>, German <sch>, etc. The variety of diacritics and complex spellings used in different national versions of the Latin alphabet (or in the Romanised transliteration of languages using other scripts) is extremely confusing. Ideally, linguists should use unambiguous phonetic transcriptions rather than conventional spellings, but the phonetic alphabet is still difficult to use on e-groups ;)

 

>Aaah.  Where do you people learn all of these little intricate things about so many languages?  =)  I know a few and can figure out many more, but knowing that an e would change to an i before a nasal is pretty deep!  Just a hobby to study all the various sound changes, or do you just happen to know Armenian?

 

I don't speak Armenian, but I know enough about Armenian to do the job I'm paid for. I'm primarily a phonologist, and it is in the first place "these little intricate things" called sound changes that catch a phonologist's eye. If I read in a historical grammar of Armenian that IE *e > Armenian i before a nasal, it's like meeting an old friend in a new place. A similar change took place in Proto-Germanic, for example, and there are accents of English (Australian, Southern US) that do the very same thing nowadays (merging "pen" and "pin").

 

>Interesting... Similar to Egyptian heiroglyphs?  (Or am I way off on that?  It's been awhile.)

 

 

Hittite spellings are partly logographic, not unlike English "10th" for "tenth", where a conventional symbol is used for the numeral, but the suffix is written with ordinary letters. The Hittites used a number of Akkadian syllabic characters, e.g. SAL 'woman', LUGAL 'king', which could be compounded as SAL.LUGAL 'queen'.

 

These Akkadian logograms encode Hittite words, and in many cases a purely Hittite spelling for them is also attested or indirectly reconstructable. For example, LUGAL-us (an Akkadian symbol plus a Hittite ending) almost certainly stands for *hassu-s 'king'. We are lucky to know the verb hassuwai- 'to rule, to be king', but despite there being thousands of LUGALs in the Hittite corpus, the overt spelling *hassus does not seem to occur even once.

 

For 'woman' we have no direct Hittite representation either, but spellings like Nom.sg. SAL-za or Gen. SAL-nas are attested copiously. These have been compared with the cuneiform Luwian 'woman' word wana-/wanatti-/unatti- and the half-ideographic hieroglyphic Luwian WOMAN-nati-. A likely common prototype is Proto-Anatolian *gua:n-s, Gen. *guan-as < PIE *gWo:n (plus a secondary *-s), *gW(e)nos.

 

Piotr