Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: *mumble* *grumble* sound changes *mutter* (longish)

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Friday, April 28, 2006, 17:20
BP Jonsson wrote:
> BTW your subrule precedence principle is great! > I could write the Swedish vowel shift in the order > things actually happened: > > a: > o: -- a: isrounded and raised > o (C,V) > _ -- short o is not affected > o: > u: -- long o: is raised > u > ü -- old u, long or short, is fronted. > > Without subrule 1 feeding subrule 3, which in turn > does not feed subrule 4! Yeah!
I may be missing something in all the programming discussion, but as to these 4 rules, IIRC in generative phonology it's not legitimate to impose conditions like "this rule N does NOT feed rule N+..."-- I could be wrong, since it's a while since I worked with rule writing...(and it may be, when one computerizes a set of phono.rules, it's permissible to impose such conditions) To avoid feeding order, these rules would have to be ordered just the reverse 4 - 3 - 1 (2 can go anywhere). To maintain your 1 -- 3-4 order, the o: output of Rule 1 has to differ _in some way_ (environment? phonetically i.e. some feature or other?) from the o: input to Rule 3; similarly the u: output of Rule 3 vis-à-vis input to Rule 4. Are you sure that's the actual historical sequence? (Asked he, ignorant of Swedish...) Perhaps (1) a: > O: , (3) o: > u: (then later rule (N), O: > o: --in fact 3 and N could be a single rule "back-round V is raised") but I can't think of a similar way around your 3-4 conflict. I'd suggest that u-fronting must have occurred first, then later o:-raising ("rule 3") partially filled in the gap (no /u/) in the system.