5 posts tagged “phonology”
Not so much a very insightful post as a mere musing.
It has always puzzled me how one language can be so resilient to changing their phonologies when loaning words while others aren't.
There's languages that take on whole new phonemes purely from loaning from other languages. English Zoo has a word initial /z/ which in native words is illegal. Dutch goes even further, all instances of /s/ and /f/ are loan phonemes. It's highly dependent on the region in how much they merge with /z/ and /v/, but in my speech I have a clear distinction between fee 'fairy' and vee 'lifestock'. Other languages have taken on completely new illegal clusters in their language like āyiskrīm in Arabic with a CCC cluster. There's also some initial CR words though I can't think of them right now. Nevertheless Arabic always stayed quite resistant, often adapting loanwords to known consonant patterns.
bank 'bank' has a plural bunūk.
Other languages have gone even further completely taking over larger parts of illegal phonological traits. Swahili is probably a good example. stampu 'stamp' with a previously illegal st cluster at the beginning of a word.
It also amuses me that french has a word like scolaire after trying so hard to get rid of that cluster over the centuries creating école out of Latin schola.
And when you see languages this open to changes you wonder why Japanese after all this time and such an enormous influx of loanwords from english still refuses to pronounce love any different than /rabu/. Why, although often written as such, video is still pronounced /bideo/ and star trek is still /sutaatorekku/. Why is Japanese so resistant to changes in phonology and why aren't other languages?
The 'contact' or 'influence' argument gets you a long way, but doesn't fully cover the problems it brings. How can Latin be said to have such contact with French that it would influence their phonology, it's a dead language after all, that wasn't spoken widely either.
And maybe something could be said about English influence in Egyptian Arabic, but is such influence stronger than anglo-mania that currently spreads throughout Japanese? Not to mention the rather great, though not as great resilience to influence in Chinese loans as well. Sure it introduced some Cy clusters, but still Chinese loans sound, and never did, nothing like Chinese.
Maybe it has something to do with how limiting a phonology is? That would stand in the way why Swahili didn't follow Japanese's path. Maybe it is actually related to the orthography too?
Any musings are welcome.
I've been working on a PDF with a reconstructed grammar and phonology of pre-Indo-European. I'm trying to be as complete as possible, which, sadly, results in very slow progress. But to keep this blog somewhat alive, I'll at least post some of the things that I have already established, one of them is a phonology.
Indo-European phonology has been highly problematic from the start, voiced aspirates without voiceless aspirates, tons of gaps; a more common palato-velar than a normal velar. It's just not very realistic. Just to give you an idea how unrealistic it looks I made a table. I reconstructed the laryngeals on commonly reconstructed places, though many Indo-europeanists leave it at 'something laryngeal'.
What a monster! There's more gaps than there are phonemes, and there's already a lot of phonemes! And I've already merged some of the catagories, fior example the *i is techincally a Palatal, not a Palato-Velar.
The first step I took is, that I established that the Palato-velars can never be original palato-velars, since it's the most common type of velar. And in any language on this planet, such a velar is the plain velar.
If the palatovelars are velars, the velars obviously can't be velars, so the probably were uvulars.
Then there's the laryngeals. The fricative line is very weird in shape. If we were to assume that *h₁ was originally [x], which is perfectly imaginable, Southern Dutch underwent the shift Proto Germanic [x] > West Germanic [h] > Dutch [h] > Southern Dutch [ʔ]. Also Cockney English went through this same shift. This leaves the Pharyngeals to simply fill up the gaps of the Labio-Velar and uvular.
Then the voiced stops were probably creaky voiced, or maybe 'glottalised' whatever that may be. And the voiced aspirates must have been 'voiced'.
If we then reparse the little table into a new model, we get a lovely symmetrical phonology which looks quite realistic, somewhat like a real language. It's almost magic.
The rest of the gaps are common. no /f/ is not a big problem. No /ŋ/ is also normal, especially since, in front of velars there's an allophone of *n as [ŋ]. Labio-velar nasals don't exist. And Uvular nasals exist, but would never exist if the velar nasal doesn't exist either.
There's very few languages that that a contrast between a labial approximant and a labio-velar approximant, so this is also realistic. And a Uvular approximant is almost unheard of.
Also if Glen gordon is right that word final *t > *s at a certain point, then word final *k > *x makes a lot more sense than *k > *ʔ.
One slight problem still remains. I reconstructed labio-velars, but considering the similarity of the way *xʷ and *χ function it is likely that *xʷ was actually *χʷ, and thus the series would be labio-uvulars. In the latest version of Indo-European this was probably also the case, but in its earliest form probably to be avoided as a reconstruction.
As Glen Gordon is currently proposing, I would not be suprised if the Uvulars turned out to be allophones of the velars in an earlier stage. But I'm a bit reluctant to reconstruct it as such yet, since I have not reconstructed indo-european back far enough yet that this becomes apparent.
Note that *y and *w, in the earliest reconstructible face do not vocalise to *i or *u ever, so there's no use to transcribe them as such anymore.
Then there's the vowels. Vowels allow me to be very short. Late indo-european gives *e, *o, *ē and *ō. I think that the long vowels are completely allophonic, at least in an earlier stage. *é and *ó existed accented, while there was no contrast in unaccented syllables. When a language only has 2 distinct vowels, you do not expect [e] and [o], but a vertical vowel system of: *ə and *a, or *ɨ and *a. I reconstruct *ə in unaccented syllables and *ə́ and *á in accented syllables. I tend to write *ə́ as *é since the fonts I use at least, do not make the most attractive schwa with combining acute accent. It shouldn't cause any confusion.
So that's it! The new and improved phonological system of Indo-European. Feel free to make any comments.
I often wonder, what do we need in spelling? Would we rather have a completely phonetic spelling, or rather a phonemic spelling?
For example Sanskrit goes incredibly far in almost being an ancient form of IPA, it has so many distinctions which are purely based on speech, and phonetics rather than the phonemes. Now my Sanskrit isn't very good, but keeping track of all those Sandhi's seems like a real pain (I'll get back to you when I finish my class this year ;))
While Dutch goes through enormous effort in its spelling to be phonemic. As you may or may not know, Dutch has word final devoicing, so a word like Dood 'death' is actually pronounced [dot]. The reasoning why we then still used a <d> rather than a <t> is because the verb doden 'to kill' does have a phonetic [d]. This process is also done for word final /b/. But it is not done for word final /v/ and /z/. so ik geef 'I give' but: zij geven 'they give'. Why they ever chose to have this terrible spelling inconsistency is beyond me. But it does make you wonder, which one is better?
Dutch goes even further in phonemic rather than phonetic spelling. For example, the third person agreement suffix is /-t/, the reasoning is, if we're going to suffix it behind every verb with third person agreement, we're also going to suffix it to words in which you can't hear this /-t/!
So you have the notorious verb worden 'become' ['ʋɔrdən]:
Ik word 'I become' ['ɪk 'ʋɔrt]
Hij wordt 'He becomes' ['hɛɪ 'ʋɔrt]
Word final -dt?! Yes, word final -dt.
Now this seems to all make grammatically sense, but for most people it is terribly difficult to make a distinction that isn't made in speech.
There's far more of these kind of odd pairs.
words which alternate between -d- and double -dd- without a phonetic distinction for example:
De beantwoorde vraag 'The answered question'
Ik beantwoordde de vraag 'I answered the question'
Now this is all well, we're still not spelling Irish right? But it still makes you wonder, how 'necessary' is to write what is said 'underlyingly' rather than exactly what you hear. Throughout times it has become more and more normal to write phonemically rather than phonetically, but besides the orthographies becoming more elegant, the spelling also tends to become a lot more difficult.
So really, readers, I'm just curious, what do you think is necessary? A phonemic spelling? A phonetic spelling? Or a combination of letters that vaguely resemble the sounds of the word that is meant? (English :P)
All right, I dug up a table of the different syllables that exist in the Chinese language.* And I figured now would be as good a time as any to reduce the horribly unphonemic pinyin to the truely underlying phonemes.
I was surprised to find out that most gaps are easily explicable, and that Chinese only has two phonemic vowels: a and e/o. I named e/o E, it seems that o occurs when it is near labials.
Now according to my theory, every word is made out of this phonemic structure:
C-Y-V-(Y/N)
Where C is the initial consonant.
Y is the glide y or w
V is the vowel a or e.
and N is the nasal n or ng.
All of these parts can be either there, or not, as long as there's at least one element, it'll be a valid syllable (although some are restricted)
Now there's some interesting things to be seen.
Labial+w initial clusters don't exist except when not followed by a vowel. Which is easy enough to understand due to the labial nature of that glide. Besides that, it's interesting to notice that the c, ch, s, sh, z, zh and r don't occur when there's no glide on second position.
The only problem I had was getting rid of the words with ü, like nü. Right now I have that one as /nyay/ which is almost definitely wrong I can't think of any good reason why a phonemic /nyay/ would display [ny] phonetically. Nevertheless, the ü glides are much too small of a class to actually be phonemic, or so I'd like to think. It is of course possible.
I was delighted to see that j/q/x were just allophones g/k/h in front of front vowels and the y glide.
now there's the word final r. that comes from enclitic er. I think that this might phonemically be /ra/ but I'll have to look into it.
Now I'll provide a little pdf, which will need some explanation. The first three pages are pretty much the pinyin spelling, but compressed into the phonemic system which I think looks right. The next three pages contain the same table, but this time with my proposed phonemic spelling. the purple background entries are the ones I'm least sure about.
Please enjoy, and this is probably very confusing, I'll try to structure it more later on.
http://members.home.nl/marijnvanputten/chinphon.pdf
*out of this terrible habit of mine, whenever I refer to Chinese, I mean mandarin Chinese, which is the only Chinese language I'm remotely familiar with. Please excuse this perpetual misnaming.
Ninja Edit:
It seems like I'm not the only idiot who came up with the two vowel system:
http://xiang.free.fr/leiden-en.pdf
See page four of this article.
I'm not really sure whether I should be happy or whether I should cry. On the one hand, it's amazing that I found this myself in one day, without any prior knowledge of this research, on the other hand, I did not find a breakthrough new theory. Haha. Oh well. They do still analyse that darned ü to exist though. I'd like to have that out of the way. But signs indicate that I probably cant. Oh well.
I'll soon make a full sketch of the Mandarin Phonology the way I see it.
Lately I've had some questions from several friends what the Centum & Satem split is about. Mostly because I have fairly controversial theories on this. So whenever I talk about Centum vs. Satem language split, and my theories about it, people generally end up asking me what Centum and Satem languages are exactly. Therefore I thought I'd write a definitive post to once and for all end these questions.
I also figured it would be nice to have some slightly easier entries on this blog about Proto Indo-European (PIE) as well. It's not unlikely that I'll write more non-Indo-Europeanist friendly entries in the future.
This blog entry will be about the sound shifts that take place in Proto Indo-European, and the languages that sprout from these. I will especially focus on the so called Centum & Satem split. Which has to do with the `velar series' in PIE. First I'll explain what these `velar series are', after that I'll explain the definition of the Centum & Satem split, and to conclude I'll give practical examples of words in Centum and Satem languages.
In PIE you have the so called `velar series'. Groups of three types of consonants with a velar articulation.
In a row they are the:
- Palato-Velars ḱ ǵ ǵʰ
- Plain Velars k g gʰ
- Labio-Velars kʷ gʷ gʷʰ
What's special about these Velar series, is that every Indo-European language only retains two of them. The so called Centum languages retain the Plain Velars and Labio-velars, and the Satem languages retain the Palato-Velars and the Plain velars.
So in Satem languages Plain Velars and Labio-Velars merge to k sounds, while Palato-Velars stay distinct. And in Centum language Plain Velars and Palato-Velars merge while Labio-Velars stay distinct.
Centum is the Latin word for `Hundred' and `Satem' the Avestan word for hundred. These words come from the Indo-European word *ḱmtom `Hundred'. This is especially illustrative, because Latin has the "K" sound here (although these days we would pronounce it as s, originally it was K) while Avestan retains the palatal articulation, and actually exaggerates it so much it becomes an s (which is the general tendency of Satem languages).
This split in how these velars are treated are generally thought to be a big split in two dialects of PIE, and this would mean a Centum language and a Satem language would never be able to form a subgroup in the Indo-European family tree together.
In the next few paragraphs I'll illustrate the difference between Centum and Satem. I'll do this by taking three words, with the three different types of velars. Then I'll show how they are reflected in a Centum (English) language and a Satem (Sanskrit) language respectively.
The three words I'll compare are the words for 'Hundred', 'Light' and 'What'.
Centum languages:
English (a Centum language) has hundred where the h comes from palatovelar ḱ (root is also *ḱmtom).
The English word light comes from the PIE root *leuk- with a plain velar which also becomes h (and later gh, but Old English spelling still has leoht.)
Thus the Palatovelar and and Plain velar have merged into h.
The English word what comes from the Indo-European word *kʷod `what'. Here you can see how kʷ (a Labio-velar) became wh and not h as with the plain velars and palatovelars.
So clearly Labio-velars are distinguished from the other velars.
Satem languages:
Sanskrit (a Satem language) has śatám for hundred also the root is *ḱmtom so the ś comes from ḱ.
The Sanskrit word for light though is roka from the root *leuk-, here you can see the ḱ stays clearly distinct from the k. as k stays k while ḱ becomes ś.
The Sanskrit word for `what' is kád which comes from the Indo-europed word *kʷod. As you can see here the labiovelar became k, and through that merged with the plain velar.
So to sum it up. English has h for Indo-European ḱ and k. And it as wh for Indo-European kʷ.
Sanskrit has ś for ḱ. And it has k for k and kʷ.
I hope this illustrates the concept Centum and Satem languages. And how the split works. Interestingly enough, a few Anatolian language (not Hittite though, that's a Centum language) retain the full three series, so they can't be defined as Centum or Satem.
As said before the general consensus is that Centum vs Satem split is something dialectal in Indo-European itself, I personally am not very convinced of this theory, which I'll try to explain in later updates.
