Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Richard W]

What are the reasons for thinking so?

The only clear reason I've seen given is mischief-making, akin to asserting that the cardinality of the continuum is
‪₃‬א, an undisprovable assertion. It's conceivable that the truth of the matter is a dialect continuum, or perhaps a system where 'languages' can be absorbed into one another. Compare hominid introgressions - chimpanzees seem to have a dash of gorilla.

[WeepingElf]

Hill's paper (the pro-Baltic one) seems more plausible to me than Kortlandt's (the anti-Baltic one), but I am no expert on this. I think that Baltic probably broke up shortly after its separation from Slavic, but some innovations may have spread across the Baltic-Slavic boundary at a time when there already were different parent dialects of Baltic and Slavic, and some dialectal differences that would later lead to the separation of East and West Baltic were beginning to appear within Baltic. I think the wave model explains such processes better than the family tree model in most cases; the only situation where you can pinpoint a year of separation is where one group emigrates and contact between the two groups is lost. Where they remain neighbours, the separation of two (or more) linguistic lineages is a gradual process, and this is the case with Balto-Slavic.

[abahot]

In my uninformed opinion, I would find it likely that a Balto-Slavic dialect continuum existed perhaps as late as the early centuries AD, before the expansion of Slavic around the fifth century assimilated all existing languages intermediate between Slavic and the two Baltic groups. In that case one could attribute the similarities between Baltic languages to the wave model where more sound changes were shared between them due to their proximity, and the only clear groupings within Balto-Slavic are ones like Slavic that obviously emerged from specific Balto-Slavic idioms and spread later.

[Ryusenshi]

I'm a bit confused about the role of accent marks in languages that use the Latin Alphabet. I used to believe that they usually mark stress, but now I've got the impression that they sometimes mark the one syllable that is not stressed, like, for instance, in the surname of the notorious French fascist collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain.

In French, accents have nothing to do with stress. Stress in French is so predictable (always on the last syllable) that we don't even notice it exists. Instead, accents mark distinct vowels. The circumflex accent "^" used to represent a length difference, often resulting from deletion of a historical coda "s" as Ryuuji said.[%] Few accents keep this length difference nowadays, though: it mostly survives in Switzerland and Belgium.

• Plain "e" is usually silent or [ə]; "é" stands for [e], while "è" stands for [ɛ]. Compare axe [aks] "axis", axé [akse] "aligned", accès [aksɛ] "access". This is the really important one.
• "ê" stands for [ɛː], though many accents merge it with [ɛ] (Canadian accents being the exception).
• "o" can be [o(ː)] or [ɔ], while "ô" is always [oː]. Compare cote [kɔt] "rating" and côte [koːt] "coast". Unlike other examples, most accents keep this [o/ɔ] distinction, with the notable exception of Southern France (we could say they have the cote-côte merger )
• "a" is [a] while "â" is [ɑː]. Compare patte [pat] "paw" and pâte [pɑːt] "dough, paste". This one is also relatively widespread, being still alive in parts of France (Normandy, Picardy) as well as Canada, Belgium, Switzerland.
• "à" is only used in a tiny number of words: its sole purpose is to distinguish between words. Most notably, (il/elle) a "(he/she) has" and à "at, to". I don't think it ever meant a difference in pronunciation.
• "i" is [ i] while "î" is [iː]. Example: il [il], île [iːl]. Again, few accents keep this distinction.
• "û" used to stand for [y:], and "oû" for [u:]. I doubt anyone makes that distinction nowadays, though.
• The letter "ù" only appears in the single word où ("where"), to distinguish from ou ("or").

You may ask: why keep this complicated system if many of those vowels have merged anyway? Well, the only answer is that we're very conservative when it comes to orthography. Heck, for once, you can't even blame the Académie Française! Indeed, they approved the 1990 rectifications that, among other things, simplified the system by getting rid of many of those pesky circumflex accents. But the rectification faced incredible outrage, and any potential reform seems dead in the water.

[%] Many cognates between French and English follow this pattern: circumflex accent in French, coda "s" in English.

• côte / coast
• hôte / host
• quête / quest
• île / isle
• forêt / forest
• bête / beast
• pâte / paste, pasta
• maître / master

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[abahot]

Seeing as how I'm still relatively new to this forum, I guess it's as good an opportunity as any to spout another nonsense linguistic theory.

My friends and I were noticing that, at least in the languages we were discussing, it seemed common for historical sound change to move vowels counter-clockwise around the IPA vowel chart -- that is, high vowels front, front vowels lower, low vowels back, and back vowels raise. Are we just seeing patterns where there are none or is this a real tendency?

[abahot]

As an example, (a highly contrived example to be sure), Proto-Germanic *mūsiz became Old English mȳs, and the front vowel evolved into the diphthong /aɪ/ in Modern English which is now pronounced as a low monophthong in some southern dialects of American English, completing about half of the journey around the vowel chart.

[Raphael]

Well, given that this is not just a counter-clockwise movement around the IPA vowel chart, but also a regular movement around the human mouth... But I better stop talking now; I know a lot less about linguistics than most people on this Board, and what I do know, I often simply soaked up by osmosis as a result of being on this Board.

[zompist]

My friends and I were noticing that, at least in the languages we were discussing, it seemed common for historical sound change to move vowels counter-clockwise around the IPA vowel chart -- that is, high vowels front, front vowels lower, low vowels back, and back vowels raise. Are we just seeing patterns where there are none or is this a real tendency?

According to William Labov, there are tendencies, though not quite as simple as your suggestion. If you can, find Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol.1. He discusses the common patterns with plenty of examples.

(I would summarize, but I'd have to re-read a lot!)

[Richard W]

My friends and I were noticing that, at least in the languages we were discussing, it seemed common for historical sound change to move vowels counter-clockwise around the IPA vowel chart -- that is, high vowels front, front vowels lower, low vowels back, and back vowels raise. Are we just seeing patterns where there are none or is this a real tendency?

My first thought is that front vowels rise, e.g. the history of English, though the unlengthened reflexes of Proto-Germanic /a/ has been yoyoing, e.g. Old English and old RP [æ], but Middle English and 21st century Modern Southern British English [a]. There might be a driving asymmetry in that [ u] > [ i] seems much commoner than [ i] > [ u], though even English offers the examples of wood. For back vowels, English offers the unconditional clockwise shift Old English <u> > old RP [ʌ] > Modern Southern British Enɡlish [ɐ].

[zompist]

As a reminder, we have a bk tag precisely so that [i] and [u] can be produced without being mistaken for BBCode.

[Travis B.]

There might be a driving asymmetry in that [ u] > [ i] seems much commoner than [ i] > [ u], though even English offers the examples of wood.

The parallel shifts of [uː] > [yː] > [iː], [u] > [y] > [i], and [ʊ] > [ʏ] > [ɪ] appear to be very common crosslinguistically; we have seen these shifts at various stages of completion in various Hellenic, Germanic, and Romance varieties to just pick some obvious examples off the top of my head.

[abahot]

There might be a driving asymmetry in that [ u] > [ i] seems much commoner than [ i] > [ u], though even English offers the examples of wood.

The parallel shifts of [uː] > [yː] > [iː], [u] > [y] > [i], and [ʊ] > [ʏ] > [ɪ] appear to be very common crosslinguistically; we have seen these shifts at various stages of completion in various Hellenic, Germanic, and Romance varieties to just pick some obvious examples off the top of my head.

It seems that vowels being pushed towards [i] is very common, so maybe it’s just the abundance of high vowels fronting compared to front vowels raising that creates a slightly counterclockwise “current” around the vowel chart.

[Richard W]

The parallel shifts of [uː] > [yː] > [iː], [u] > [y] > [i], and [ʊ] > [ʏ] > [ɪ] appear to be very common crosslinguistically; we have seen these shifts at various stages of completion in various Hellenic, Germanic, and Romance varieties to just pick some obvious examples off the top of my head.

There's also a shift via high back unrounded vowels, which is why I didn't spell the above paths out. It's seen in Scots, and may be suspected for Japanese (can the Japonicists please confirm or deny?).

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I had always assumed the wood example was at least in part under the influence of the initial [w].

[Richard W]

I had always assumed the wood example was at least in part under the influence of the initial [w].

And similarly for church from Old English cirice, except that that's merely from labialisation, and I'm not sure how certain the labialisation of the initial is. However, this mini-discussion was kicked off with an instance of umlaut.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Do we have a date for the fir-fur merger? I've been trying to find one.

[abahot]

I had always assumed the wood example was at least in part under the influence of the initial [w].

Wikipedia says OE *wudu is a dissimilation from *widu, but I assume they mean it’s an assimilation under the influence of the following *u.

But in any case, it’s sporadic and not at all a regular shift like the massive exodus of back vowels to the front.

[Ryusenshi]

Do we have a date for the fir-fur merger? I've been trying to find one.

According to John C. Wells, in Accents of English:

The merging of these various Middle English vowels seems to have started in northern and eastern dialects of English in the fifteenth century; by the sixteenth it had spread to popular London speech, and by the seventeenth to the precursor of RP.

[anteallach]

Do we have a date for the fir-fur merger? I've been trying to find one.

According to John C. Wells, in Accents of English:

The merging of these various Middle English vowels seems to have started in northern and eastern dialects of English in the fifteenth century; by the sixteenth it had spread to popular London speech, and by the seventeenth to the precursor of RP.

However, in the pronunciation scheme in the original OED different symbols are used for curl, fur and fir, fern, earth, the choice of symbols suggesting that the former was [ʌː] or the like and the latter [əː]. Now, there may be some Scottish influence in the system and you have to wonder whether anyone actually made some of the distinctions on that chart, but it does suggest that some people still made a two-way distinction in the 19th century.