Zompist Bboard Again

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 1:31 pm The only limitations of reconstruction I see is that One cannot reconstruct Classical Latin of 1st century BC from contemporary Romance languages which means that they started splitting later than this date.

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 1:31 pm The only limitations of reconstruction I see is that One cannot reconstruct Classical Latin of 1st century BC from contemporary Romance languages which means that they started splitting later than this date.

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 4:58 pm No. Dialects can develop in parallel even in isolation. For example, as far as I'm aware, the accusative singular ending in -m is not reconstructable, but it was already feeble in the 1st century BC. Remember that vowel + m elides before another vowel in classical scansion.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 30, 2022 4:27 pm That's a really interesting observation. I agree about the implications, but I'm not sure about the reason for them.

One thing that may be relevant is Neg Hopping. English allows the negative to hop over to the left as far as possible (compare Mandarin which requires that it stick with the element negated). This interacts with scope, as Creyeditor suggests— it can be harder to figure out what an English speaker is actually negating. In this example, though, scope doesn't seem to be the issue, as what's being negated is the fairness.

However, there might be a pragmatic signal here. Not using Neg Hopping can give a sentence a narrow or pedantic feel— thus it's appropriate for a concession. ("The defendant recognizes that unwarranted language may have been used.") So maybe that's why the first sentence feels like a concession, while the second (with normal Neg Hopping) is more appropriate for a complaint.

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 10:15 am How likely would it be for prepositions to become postpositions? It happened in many Indo Aryan languages if not all of them.

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:12 pm When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:14 pm

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:12 pm When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:30 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:14 pm

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:12 pm When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

I can personally contrast [ii] and [ji] myself...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 6:01 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:30 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:14 pm

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

I can personally contrast [ii] and [ji] myself...

Are you sure? When I try it comes out as something like [ii] vs [jɨ̯i] — which gives a phonemic distinction between /ii/ and /ji/, but not a phonetic one.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 6:46 pm There are literally people who speak Danish. No phonetic distinction is too trivial to be meaningful.

I understand why ii and ji are tricky to distinguish in initial position, but try it after a consonant: fii vs fji. Way different, right?

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:08 pm

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 6:46 pm There are literally people who speak Danish. No phonetic distinction is too trivial to be meaningful.

True, but my point is that there is no phonetic difference between [j] and [i]. They are the same thing. What difference exists is phonemic: one acts as a syllable nucleus, and the other doesn’t.

I understand why ii and ji are tricky to distinguish in initial position, but try it after a consonant: fii vs fji. Way different, right?

Not at all. [fii] and [fji] sound exactly the same. /fii/ and /fji/ can sound different, but that’s because the latter ends up getting realised as something more like [fjɪ̯i].

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:19 pm To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:20 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:19 pm To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.)

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 8:54 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:20 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 7:19 pm To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.)

Why? Vowels are more open than consonants generally (indeed, that's pretty much the defining characteristic of vowels). Almost definitionally, [j] is a less open version of [i].

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 9:37 pm You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 9:53 pm

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 9:37 pm You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same.

Well, of course they aren’t! However, in narrow transcription, [uu] and [wu] are the same, for precisely the same reason that [ii] and [ji] are the same.