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

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.