Proto-Norse vowels in ultimate
From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
Date: | Thursday, February 2, 2006, 13:47 |
Hi!
I'm currently gathering data for my new long-term project S17, which
will be Latin with Icelandic sound changes. The conhistory will
probably start around 150~200 AD. I will probably base the conlang on
the Classical Latin vowel system because it particularly fits the
Proto-Norse vowel inventory better than Late/Vulgar Latin. The time
frame should be ok for this, but the details have not been worked out
since I'm still learning.
I plan to abuse selectively a few of the Proto-Germanic (PG) >
Proto-Norse (PN) changes to adjust the sounds of Latin to what I need
to run my Grand Master Plan. Yesterday, I ran into a yet-unanswered
(to me) problem in the Proto-Norse sound system:
I gathered that the possible vowels in the ultimate of Proto-Norse are
the following:
Short: /a/,
/e/,
/i/,
/u/
Long: /&:/ (_á_),
/a:/ (in -_áR_ from PG -_ai~z_),
/e:/,
/i:/,
/o:/,
/y:/ _iu_
I.e., from a symmetric system, /o/ and /u:/ are missing.
PN does have /u:/, but not in the ultimate according to my data.
My question is: why not?
I understand that there is no /o/ due the shift of IE /o/ > PG /a/
(very few /o/ do occur but they are seldom and not in the ultimate),
and all the others I also understand, but my sources mentioned no
sound shift(s) that would remove a long /u:/ from the ultimate. Did I
oversee anything? I mean, it may well just be defective accidentally,
but maybe there's an obvious reason.
If there really is no ultimate /u:/, I will have to think about the
Latin u-declension. There are several alternatives, but I first
wanted to check out whether my phoneme lists are correct.
Bye,
Henrik