Re: Etymology of the Italian surname 'Brighenti'

At 2:14:49 AM on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

[...]

>>>>> But I think the *-en- > *-in- spread as
>>>>> hypercorrection from those strong verbs being
>>>>> regularized, see
>>>>> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html

>>>> Why? At best your fixation on shibboleths makes you a
>>>> blind man claiming that an elephant is very like a rope.

>>> The traditional explanation claims two separate rules
>>> caused *-en- > -in- in 2,3sg, 'pre-nasal raising' and
>>> umlaut; my explanation has no such causal overlap.

>> The verbs *bindanã 'to tie', *helpanã 'to help' and
>> *werpanã 'to throw' are all Class III strong verbs and
>> started out with identical root vowel (*e) and identical
>> conjugations, but only in the first was the *e of the
>> root raised to *i throughout the present. You want
>> analogy to extend i-umlaut of *e from words like *bindanã
>> to completely unrelated words like *hringaz, but not to
>> words like *helpanã; that's very implausible. It's much
>> simpler to note that nasals have a tendency to raise
>> preceding /e/ anyway, so that the observed change isn't
>> particularly surprising; there's no need to invoke
>> dubious psychological explanations. (And for all I know
>> there may be other reasons to keep the two separate.)

> You've gotten half of it, but you haven't quite thought it
> through.

No, *you* haven't thought it through. Or if you have, your
bizarre sociolinguistic axioms make it a case of GIGO.

> What I claim is that in the class III verbs,
> analogy-leveling was done in -en- verbs, not in the
> others, or rather, that, of all the 'faulty' (by the then
> standard class III paradigm) levelings, those of the -en-
> verbs survived (were preferred by those who mattered), the
> rest didn't. In that period of uncertainty, -in- was
> substituted for -en- also in other contexts by presumably
> the same people, or those who wanted to emulate them.

As should have been clear from my post, I understood that
this was your claim. And as I said, it's implausible and
unnecessary.

>>> Two rules causing the same one effect is a sign the
>>> theory was designed wrong.

>> Unless there really are two different things causing the
>> same effect.

> And the other examples are?

Of what? And who cares? I was objecting to the general
statement.

In any case, your comment was a non sequitur. First, there
are two different effects: raising of *e to *i when followed
in the same or the next syllable by a high vowel, and
raising of *e to *i when followed by a nasal in the coda of
the same syllable. The latter occurs without the high vowel
trigger, and the former occurs without the nasal.

Secondly, your explanation still leaves you with the two
rules i-umlaut and pre-nasal raising: making the latter an
indirect, psychosocial consequence of the former does not
change its status as an independent rule or magically turn
it into a form of i-umlaut.

>> Do you really imagine that the possibility of a single
>> cause never occurred to someone who actually knew what he
>> was doing?

> Yes.

Amazing. And sad.

> Most people think like you do.

>> I never cease to be astonished at the readiness of
>> some dilettantes to assume that a couple of centuries' worth
>> of experts missed the obvious instead of rejecting it for
>> good reason.

> I was going to add a word of comfort that I had a deep
> faith in you that you would one day come up with an
> original thought of your own, but having witnessed the
> process by which you weed them out, I realize that would
> only have caused you discomfort.

I've enough of them that I can afford to weed out the crap.

Brian