Re: Messy orthography (Re: Sound change rules for erosion)

At 09:20 PM 11/20/03 -0600, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora wrote:
> > If I were to set up the orthography and then keep it the same after the
> > sound changes, I would have to spell the Trehelo word for 'fox' as
> > <siotune> (which is the proto-form, and quite possibly attested in writing
> > somewhere) and pronounce it as [So?On].  That's a little too far out of
> > synch for my sanity, so I spell it <shohon>.
>
>You could always have a "sane" romanization and an "insane" native
>orthography.  :-)  My Ivetsian will be something like that.
That's a possibility.  They've had written languages, and printing presses
with movable type, for a very long time, so the opportunity to get a truly
insane spelling scheme is definitely there.

> > What that means is that, in the modern language, the singular of the noun
> > is /cet/ and the plural is /cet_w/.  The second gender in Trehelo is made
> > up of nouns that form their plurals by labializing the final consonant,
> > whatever that consonant happens to be.
>
>Can *all* consonants be labialized?  What about labial consonants?  Can
>[p_w] exist, or would it be simplified to [p], creating a group of nouns
>whose plural is identical to the singular.
Labial consonants can be labialized by adding lip-rounding during their
production.

The only obstruents that cannot be labialized are the alveopalatal
fricatives and affricates, which arose from the combination of an alveolar
with a front vowel.  The necessary three-vowel sequences (alveolar+front
vowel+back vowel+V) which would have conditioned a labialized alveopalatal
were not present in the parent language.

I did some thinking last night as to whether you could end up with a
Trehelish word whose singular was identical to its plural, and the answer
that I got was no.  A word like <tatw> 'leaf', which looks plural in the
singular, would not belong to the labialization declension, since it was
originally *tatui, ending in a vowel.  If it does, or even used to, end in
a vowel, then the plural is in -n: <tatwin> 'leaves.'  Any word ending in a
labialized consonant in the singular used to end in a short vowel, which
was later dropped, and so takes its plural in -n.  The labialized plurals
are for nouns which ended in a consonant in the proto-language.

And I should add that, since I have thought it through over the last 24
hours, I think that things get kind of messy when you want to pluralize a
noun ending in a consonant.  It might form its plural by labialization, or
it might form it in -Vn.  Unfortunately, you simply have to know - and if
it forms its plural in -Vn, then you simply have to know which vowel.  It
is entirely conceivable that there could be another word <tatw> in the
singular with the plural of <tatwon>.  It could be any one of the five vowels.

You could also have up to five words which were <cet> in the singular and
each had different plurals (six words if the vowel in the last syllabe of
the singular were an [a].)  You could also have words which had identical
plurals <ceton> and different singulars: <cet> < *ceto, and <ceto> <
*cetoo.  Is that enough homophony for a language?  Some of the vowel
harmonizations are going to have created more homophones, as will the
process which produces the glottal stop.

What do you think that speakers of the language might term the declension
that takes its plural in labialization?  Now that I have thought it over,
it is more of a declension than it is a gender.

>It might also be neat to have a dialect or related language that changed
>those labialized consonants to something else, e.g., [t_w] -> [p], thus,
>the plural of /cet/ would be /cep/  :-)
I'll give some thought to it, but the standard dialects don't do it, and I
think that Trehelish is the only language in the group to have gotten
actual labialized obstruents.  At least one of the other languages went as
far as to turn those back vowels or high back vowels into glides before
other vowels, but it didn't take it all the way and truly labialize the
consonant.  But even if it didn't actually labialize the consonants, that
doesn't mean that I can't take your suggestion.  Something like that could
probably be made to work.

Isidora

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