Re: [tied] Other IE language with /w/

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Jarrette
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 12:19 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Other IE language with /w/




> Grzegorz Jagodzinski <grzegorj2000@...> wrote:


>> 1) The Sorbian languages have preserved initial w- in most positions.
Anyway, w- remains [w] in Lower Sorbian except when before o, u in native
words (where it changed into [h]).

> -- Thank you for informing me. That is very interesting, Slavic languages
> that have preserved initial /w/. Pardon my ignorance, but in which
> countries are these languages spoken? Is it Poland or the Czech republic,
> as I suspect?

No, in SE Germany. The Slavic language area expanded once (6th - 9th
centuries AD, I believe) up to the Elbe river and even more west (the
article on Limes Sorabicus is in German Wikipedia -
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_Sorabicus, and has not been translated
into English yet). During the second half of the Middle Age and the Modern
Age the Germans spread into the east but the Slavs managed to preserve their
ethnicity in some places.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages,
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=dsb and
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=hsb,
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~sorb/engl/lang.htm, or just use Google for more
information.

The information on Sorbian pronunciation on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_alphabet is highly incomplete (however,
[w] for the Lower Sorbian <w> is mentioned there). My page on Sorbian
(http://www.aries.com.pl/grzegorzj/gram/unipl/luzyc.html) is available only
in Polish as for now (however some information may be understood). I have
based myself on a book in German and informations from a scholar
specializing in Sorbian and a Sorbian speaker at the same time.

The Upper Sorbian <w> is also [w], at least in some positions, not [v] like
Wikipedia says, cf. "w und l sind wie englisches w zu sprechen, also wie u
in sauer" from the Upper Sorbian online course (in German):
http://sibz.whyi.org/~edi/wucbnica/1.lekcija.html.


>> 2) Standard Dutch (I mean the standard variant which is being described
>> in
teach-yourself books etc.) changed the bilabial approximant /w/ (in anlaut)
into the labio-dental approximant, so the change is less than in most other
IE languages.

> -- this is what Sanskrit is supposed to have had and what modern Hindi,
> Panjabi, Gujarati, etc. have (though with velar co-articulation), even
> though the many times I have heard the Indian labio-dental approximant,
> and I have listened carefully and intently with the intention of testing
> what I have read in books, I would still swear that they use two
> allophones, a rounded one before rounded vowels and perhaps back vowels,
> and a labiodental one before other vowels, which are indistinguishable
> from /w/ in the former case and /v/ in the latter case, to my ear at
> least.

> And every time I have heard Dutch speakers, and again I listened carefully
> and intently and asked them repeat words so that I could hear them as
> clearly as possible, their "w" sounds exactly like an English "v", while
> their "v" sounds like the identical sound in some Dutch speakers, but like
> English "f" by many other Dutch speakers. But I have an English ear by
> birth so I will never know what Dutch speakers hear.

You are fully right, and that is why I wrote "I mean the standard version".
I was also interested in this problem, and just asked some native Dutch
speakers what they think. Basing on what they said I can present the thing
this way now: the pronunciation of (initial) <w> as the labio-dental
approximant is recommended by some courses and dictionaries (including these
I have) but is spread only in some dialects, especially those from the
southern part of the Dutch language area. In Amsterdam there is a tendency
to pronounce all z's as [s] and all v's as [f], and, as a consequence,
initial w's become [v] (without mixing <v> and <w>). A similar pronunciation
seems to exist in the northern part of the Dutch area. One of my respondents
wrote that his <f> is always fully voiceless, <w> is fully voiced, and
finally <v> is something between them. Of course, the syllable-final <w>
means [w] in all varieties of Dutch.

By the way, we can find preserving of [w] pronunciation in syllable-final
position in some other languages. The Common Slavic (Late Proto-Slavic) <v>
must have been [w], not [v], in all positions, and we can find many traces
of that state in modern Slavic languages. In Belarussian and Ukrainian the
syllable-final *v is [w] in fact - and it is hard to say whether this is an
archaism or an innovation (syllable-final *l also yielded [w] in many
instances in these languages). Russian [v] seems to be an approximant rather
than spirant in some positions (not when before a front vowel) and in some
dialects as well. It is really hard to say more on this because Russian hard
(i.e. not palatalized) consonants are strongly velarized, and the velarized
spirant [v] and the labio-dental approximant are similar acoustically. I
pronounce the approximant rather than spirant, especially between a
consonant and a vowel like in [tvoj] 'your(s) (sing.), thy' but I am not a
Russian native speaker. Traces of the approximantic pronunciation rather
than spirantic are preserved in some Polish dialects (or even idiolects - it
seems to be a preference of some individual speakers) - the pronunciation
[tv], [sv], [kv] etc. (which occurs in these dialects / idiolects) breaks
the phonetic rule that all obstruents in the given cluster must be either
voiced or voiceless in Polish (indeed, the standard pronunciation of these
groups is [tf], [sf], [kf]).

>> 3) Spanish v- can be the bilabial stop [b] or the bilabial fricative
["beta"]; the latter pronunciation (which occurs after a final vowel of the
preceding word) is close to [w]. Of course we can discuss whether such a
pronunciation is taken directly from Latin [w] or it is secondary, from [b]
< [v] < [w] (the original [b] has changed in the same way). But the fact is
a fact... Spanish <v> can be very close to [w].

> -- Yes, I have noticed this in Spanish speakers. Every time I hear them
> say the name "Eva" I think I am hearing "Aywa".

> Andrew

Intervocalic <b> is pronounced in the same way (like in Habana [aBana], Cuba
[kuBa], etc. (B = beta)): the two graphems, <b> and <v>, represents one
Spanish phoneme, with two main allophones [b] and ["beta"] which are
pronounced independently on the spelling. So, we can also suppose than all
Latin [w]'s merged with [b] in Proto-Spanish, and only next the two
allophones arose. So, the example is not very convincing.

Grzegorz J.



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