Re: Scientist's etymology vs. scientific etymology

--- Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
> <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
> >
> > English acquired initial /z-/ and /v-/ from
> French.
> > That's indisputable.
>
> But that doesn't mean that English didn't already
> have /z/ and /v/ as
> phonemes, just in a more limited distribution.

English did have intervocalic /-z-/ and /-v-/ but
distribution is important. We have intervocalic and
final /c/, /mp/, etc. but not initial

>
> Gaelic acquired /p/ from Latin,
> > French and English --although Torsten is trying to
> > throw a monkey wrench into this by claiming a
> > substrate /p/ or whatnot.
>
> Could [p] have existed in a limited distribution in
> Gaelic, e.g. as an
> allophone of /b/, and subsequently [p] become
> phonemicized by the
> influence of foreign words? (Similar to the English
> story for /z/ and
> /v/) I don't know anything about Gaelic I'm afraid.

There are a handful of words that do have an
unexplained <p>. Scots Gaelic, of course does have /p/
but as its realization on <b>. Scots Gaelic has
aspirated and pre-aspirated stops, which it acquired
from Old Norse

>
> > French /R/ has spead to Germanic languages.
>
> Probably an independent development in these
> languages, not an
> adoption from French.

I've read a lot of popular and general stuff that
purports to show a trajectory from France to
Scandinavia.

>I have a Ukrainian friend who
> is unable to
> pronounce the alveolar trill /r/ of Ukrainian and
> Russian so she
> substitutes /R/, even though she has practically no
> knowledge of
> French. A similar innovation could have happened in
> Germanic.
>
> > English /S/ has spread to Spanish --most people
> now
> > say /So/ and /SopiN/ instead of /CHo/ and /CHopiN/
> for
> > show and shopping.
>
> But /CH/ is merely [t] plus [S], so they could have
> extracted /S/ from
> this phoneme (i.e. the sound [S] already exists in
> Spanish, just in an
> extremely restricted distribution).

It's still a different sound. I've heard /S/ as
regional for /CH/ in Sonora, Panamá and among working
class people from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In
Buenos Aires, of course, it's the regional form of
<ll>, which is cognate to Portuguese <ch> (/S/). There
was a huge Portuguese/Brazilian influence in early
Buenos Aires.
I've come across substrate words with /S/ in Mexico,
Central America and the Andean Countries --although
the Mexicans and some Central American no longer
pronounce the words with /S/. But /S/ in shopping and
show is pretty universal in Latin America thanks to TV

>
> /
> > English glottal stop exists in hypercorrect
> Spanish
> > and is widespread in Salvadoran Spanish where
> <Santa
> > Ana> comes out as /santa?ana/ and not standard
> > /santaana/.
>
> Could be an independent development in Spanish.

No, such a large percentage of the population has
either been to the US or have family there. A large
share of the population speaks English and you hear a
lot of local families speaking English in public.
There are 5 million Salvadorans in El Salvador and 3
million in the US, another million in the rest of
Latin America (mainly Costa Rica and Mexico) and
another million elsewhere --including Australia (a
half million, I've been told, but that seems way too
high), Spain, Sweden and Italy.

>
> > Porteño Spanish has /S/ for <ll> probably due to
> the
> > influence of Portuguese --see Spanish lluvia vs.
> > Portuguese chuva.
>
> I thought that this /S/ was a devoicing of earlier
> /Z/ (postalveolar
> sibilant) such as found in Argentinian Spanish,
> itself a (independent)
> development of /L/ (palatal /l/).

It may be a combination of the two. In Latin America,
/Z/ is often found in places where Portuguese settled
in great numbers, e.g. Mexico, Argentina, etc. But
there are parts of Spain where /Z/ exists as well.