Re: Etymology of the Italian surname 'Brighenti'

At 1:53:39 PM on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> 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.

> This habit you have of using value judgments as premises
> in your line of reasoning, is that something you have
> carried over from your day job in math? 'Oh, what a nasty
> number, I don't like it'?

That isn't a premise: it's a conclusion.

>>> 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.

> It is clear from your post you didn't. This my proposal,
> chronologically:

> 1. Umlaut causes stem vowel /e/ > /i/ in (among all else)
> 2,3sg, 2pl of Gmc. class III verbs

> 2. In verbs with originally *-en-, the -in- forms are
> substituted by generalization into 1sg, 1,3pl, in the
> rest, -en- is similarly substituted into 2pl.

> 3. The -en- > -in- substitution spreads to the rest of the
> vocabulary.

I know. That's exactly what I understood you to be
proposing.

> You conflated 2. and 3.,

I did not. It is clear that you did not read my post
carefully enough.

> thereby labeling 2+3 a kind of umlaut which of course it
> isn't.

Indeed it isn't, and I did not say that it was.

> I don't 'extend i-umlaut of *e from words like *bindanã to
> completely unrelated words like *hringaz, but not to words
> like *helpanã'.

Obviously I'm talking about the result, not the process.
Your English is good enough that I sometimes forget that
you're not a native speaker.

[...]

>>>>> 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?

> Of two rules causing the same one effect.

>> And who cares?

> Oh, so you did know, you were just being contrary.

No, I didn't. You could have been referring to other
examples demonstrating that two different rules were
involved in this particular effect; in fact, I was leaning
slightly towards that interpretation.

>> I was objecting to the general statement.

> The only surefire way to do that is to provide a
> counterexample. You didn't.

Waste of time. Look around you: the world is full of
effects that can be caused in more than one way.

>> 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.

> You must have misunderstood something. This is a
> restatement of the traditional explanation, not a premise
> which supports it or disproves my alternative proposal.

It isn't an explanation at all: it's a description of the
observed facts -- you know, the ones that you're trying to
explain. It's a descriptively correct statement, whatever
the explanation of the observations may be.

> Circular.

Pfft. It's just a description, so it can't be circular.

>> 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.

> If I make one of the rules a consequence of the other,
> then it is dependent on, not independent of that rule.

You think that you've isolated the cause of pre-nasal
raising and that it has to do with the outcome of a
different sound change, but descriptively there are still
two distinct phonological facts. And you don't make one
rule a consequence of the other; you make it dependent on
the outcome of the other, which is not the same thing. Your
(3) would not be a necessary consequence or inherent part of
your (1) & (2) even if your account were correct.

Brian