At 1:33:28 on Friday, 31 March 2006, Patrick Ryan wrote:
> From: Piotr Gasiorowski
[...]
>> *-ro- losing its *-r- because there is another liquid in
>> the adjacent syllable is pure fantasy? It's called
>> dissimilatory loss, like <library> becoming "lib'ary" or
>> <secretary> "seck'etary". To quote H.H. Hock (_Principles
>> of Historical Linguistic_, in the section devoted to
>> dissimilation), "the only process which could be
>> considered a 'complete' dissimilation is _dissimilatory
>> loss_..."
> There are incompetent "experts" represented in every
> branch of every study.
Hock would not appear to be one of them, however.
> I invite anyone to Google "dissimilate" and see how much
> acceptance Hock's pronouncements generally enjoy.
Try 'dissimilatory loss'. It appears also in chemical
contexts, but the following items all appear in the first
two pages of returns:
It's used in 'The deletion of final /s/ in Mani and
Corsica', Nick Nicholas, University of Melbourne, 2nd
International Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and
Linguistic Theory.
<www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Work/cargese-s-handout.pdf>
'The proverbial word in Sranan', Norval Smith.
<www.let.rug.nl/~koster/DenBesten/Smith.pdf>
It's a section title in Michael Weiss's 'Outline of the
Comparative Grammar of Latin':
<ling.cornell.edu/Weiss/CGL_15_Cons._Revisited_1.pdf>
It's used in the discussion of Lith. <aguona> 'poppy' in
Derksen's Baltic inherited lexicon and in the discussion of
Toch. B <klutk-> in Adams' dictionary of Toch. B, both at
<
http://www.ieed.nl/%5Cindex2.html>.
Discussing the language of the Greek epics:
<ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2004/2004-03-12.html>
Brian D Joseph uses it to state Grassmann's Law in a
LinguistList posting:
<listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9402a&L=linguist&D=1&P=1812>
Alexander Lubotsky uses it in 'RV. a vidhat', originally in
Früh-, Mittel-, Spätindogermanisch. Akten der IX. Fachtagung
der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 5. bis 9. Oktober 1992
in Zürich, edd. George E. Dunkel, Gisela Meyer, Salvatore
Scarlata, Christian Seidl. Wiesbaden 1994, 201-206.
<www.ieed.nl/lubotsky/pdf/rvavidhat.pdf>
It's used in a summary of a note by Peter Schrijver on OIr
<dëec>, <dëac>, in Ériu 44 (1993), pp. 181-4.
<
http://bill.celt.dias.ie/vol4/displayObject.php?TreeID=1238&TypeID=4>
It's used by David Stifter (lecturer at the Institut für
Sprachwissenschaft at the University of Vienna and chair of
the Austrian Society for Celtic Studies) in a posting to
Old-Irish-L.
<
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501&L=old-irish-l&T=0&P=19189>
> Neither of the examples you cited are "dissimilatory
> loss"; they are stupid, sloppy enunciation not recognized
> by any competent speaker of English.
I expect a great many competent speakers of English to be
quite familiar with both of them, since they're very common
-- so common, indeed, that schoolteachers traditionally
fought them tooth and nail (without much success). And
whether you like them or not, whether they are
prescriptively acceptable or not, they are *precisely*
examples of dissimilatory loss.
You're trying to tell us that water isn't wet.
[...]
Brian