Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

At 10:38 am -0700 4/7/99, Charles wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
.....
>> No English speaker that I've ever met - and I've met quite a few in my 60
>> years - intuitively considers 'a/an' to be an unstressed variant of 'one'.
>
>It's pretty clear to anyone who learns the French/Spanish word for "a/an".
To which At 10:42 pm -0500 4/7/99, Nik Taylor correctly responded:
....
>That's hardly "native intuition", and anyways, I've learned those, and I
>still don't see "one" and "a/an" as being analogous IN ENGLISH.
Indeed, it's also bad linguistics.  If one has to appeal to other languages
to describe English, then there is no end to the analogies one might find.
Except in communities, e.g. Welsh speakers, where virtually everyone is
bilingual to some degree, one can describe a language synchronically only
in terms of itself.

Also, of course, the anglophone community is notorious for the number of
monoglots it contains.  The majority of English speakers, alas, know no
Spanish or French, so the arguments sucks yet again.

>I Spanish they are the same word "Un chico" can mean "a boy" or "one boy",
>depending on context.  It's clearly a case of Spanish using one word for
>what is two (admittedly semantically and diachronically related) words in
>English's.
Well, yes.  I happen to know that diachronically the indefinite article in
Breton (eur, eul, eun) and the word for 'one' (unan) are related; but
synchronically they are quite clearly two different words.

The variation in the definite article BTW is caused by the fact that the
word is a proclitic and modifies the final consonant to make life easier:
it is 'eun' before vowels, /n/, /t/, /d/ and 'mute h'; 'eul' before /l/;
and 'eur' before all other consonants including /H/ (voiced glottal
fricative).

Charles then continued:
>[about clitics]
.....
>
>Well that's it, I'm only up to Herodotus.
And enclitics occur a-plenty in Herodotus (as, indeed, in all ancient Greek
authors - and the pesky things are still there in modern Greek :)

----------------------------------------------------------
Also at 10:40 pm -0500 4/7/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
....
>> In modern French 'je' & 'me' are _always_ bound and clitic, 'moi' is not
>> bound and is not a clitic.
>
>Well, perhaps I should've said something like "variant".  Another
>example is Spanish "un" and "uno", "un" is a clitic, while "uno" is a
>free word, and the two are obviously dia- and synchronically connected, IMO.
Yes, the Spanish un, uno is rather different as the forms are so little
different as to seem intuitively variants of the 'same word'.

I suppose the normal thing would be to regard 'je', 'me' & 'moi' as
allomorphs (tho quite what one'd choose as the shape of the morpheme is not
clear to me) and to say that 'moi' is used when the morpheme is free and
that 'je' & 'me' are bound varieties  and then, of course, to details the
situations when 'je' and 'me' would be used.

>> In the western
>> Romancelangs we _write_ them as separate words while in Romanian we append
>> the article and write it as 'part of the preceding word'.  But in all they
>> are clitics, cf.
>
>I may be mistaken, but aren't there also some morphophonemic
>alternations involved with Romanian's articles?  (Altho I guess the same
>could be said of French, with le/l')?
Correct on both accounts   :)

>> Proclitics on the other hand are always written in Europeanlangs either as
>> separate 'words' or hyphenated, but never AFAIK fully prefixed.
>
>French l'homme, there the article is written as a prefix.
Except for the apostrophe - but as as good as a prefix.  IIRC the
Semiticlangs actually do write the prefixed article as a prefix.  And in
some English dialects one comes forms like /tapl/ or /Tapl/ (yes - the
sounds are voiceless) for standard English /DI'&pl/ "the apple".

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G.Hamann - 1760]
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