Re: [tied] Affects of immigrant communities in language change

I didn't mean they were unrelated; I just meant they worked differently, in opposite directions. But that doesn't mean there is no influence, and we might be onto something here...

Has there been any major scholarly work on fronted vowels in Germanic and Uralic and Altaic?

~DaW~ (no man's an island, but some are definitely peninsulae)

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

From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 7:22 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Affects of immigrant communities in language change

One goose, two geese, eine gans, zwei gänse is umlaut. Germanic umlaut is sometimes described as 'a kind of vowel harmony'. Using David Crystal's example of foot-feet, OE nom-sing *fot nom-pl *fotiz, the second vowel altered the first, to *fitiz. FooTEES became Fee-TEEs (via umlaut, and a reduction of the ending), giving a fossized ModE feet. Umlaut is dead in English, preserved only in a few fossils like this. I gather it's weakly alive in German, however, via analogy. Aggh. I'm told the German-language groups have fights among themselves on the definition of the word 'umlaut', much for the same reasons English-speakers muddle the definition of 'umlaut'. The most commonly understood English definition of umlaut refers to the double-overdot diacritic: it's an umlaut, whatever the language. The words trema and diaresis get dragged into the argument. To tell the truth, I have little insight as to why any language would deform a vowel to agree with the shape of the next vowel, but this is exactly what Turkish does. It's as if language incorporates perverted kind of metathesis as a fundamental phonological feature. Explain why vowel harmony and umlaut are not related.