Re: beyond langauges

At 7:27:11 AM on Saturday, May 3, 2008, jouppe wrote:

[...]

> Another observation of a contrary development: Modern
> Icelandic treats Old Norse geminated -ll- in an odd
> fashion, it becomes devoiced and a precursory -t- is
> inserted into the pronounciation, for example <gull>
> [gutL] (where capital L is used for voiceless lateral).

This isn't relevant to your point, but it's actually closer
to [gYtL].

> Maybe a Celtic substratum here, does not welsh have
> voiceless laterals?

Yes, but I believe that they're a relatively late
development, at least as a distinct phoneme. If I remember
correctly, Jackson thought it was probably fully established
by the tenth century but not a whole lot earlier, since it
doesn't seem to have been recognized earlier as a
distinctive sound by the Anglo-Saxons.

> The interesting point is that AFAIK Icelandic has no
> contrastive consonant length,

If you analyze it as having contrastive consonant length,
I'm pretty sure that vowel length becomes completely
predictable. E.g., <grunnur> 'foundation, base; ground',
with [n:], must have [Y], while <grunur> 'suspicion', with
[n], must have [Y:]. This does result in a few odd-looking
realizations, e.g., [hp] for /p:/ and [tL] for /l:/, but I
don't know of any real obstacles.

> so the "affricate" must be interpreted as one phoneme,
> much as spanish -rr- or Catalan -tll-, not a sequence.

Brian