Re: [tied] The disappearance of *-s -- The saga continues

Miguel:

> This is of course completely backwards. It's alveolar /r/
> which causes /s/ to become /S/. I'm not aware of this
> occurring in Icelandic, but it's certainly what happens in
> Swedish.

Probably. If I remember gramma speaking Swedish, she did
too but she was fully bilingual so she pronounced English
without the Bjork effect. I'm sure, having heard Icelandic
people talk English, not just Bjork, several times that they
must do this too because I can hear it distinctly.

At any rate, assimilation processes can work in either
direction. So while we might find /r/ alveolarizing
following /s/, there's nothing to say that we can't
conversely see /s/ alveolarizing preceding /r/.

> Besides, what's the problem anyway? The nominative ending
> *-s (perhaps still *-z) disappears after _all_ PIE sonorants
> except /w/. Since that includes /y/ and /m/, the whole
> thing obviously has nothing to do with alveolarity/
> dentality.

Well, maybe we're both wrong because with accusative plural
*-ns and *kWi-s "who" nothing seems to work, not even your
rule.


= gLeN