Re: Jameld (was: Re: Germanic YANC alert!)

Nik wrote:

> James Campbell wrote:
> > Conhistorically, _t~s_ developed from OJ _ts'_ (that's s-acute), which
in
> > some way represented a /S/-like sound
>
> Why not originally /tS/?  Say, s' was once used for /S/, thus ts' was
> /tS/, but the two sounds merged, and for whatever reason, s' was
> dropped; or perhaps s' became another sound, perhaps /x/, and then was
> lost, after that, /tS/ simplified to /S/.
Hm, but how do I get from Gmc /sk/ to /tS/? I've always just treated it as a
spelling oddity. Loads of things don't make real sense once I start trying
to explain them.


> > [* Not being a qualified linguist, I don't know if this would really
work -
> > are very small populations more or less linguistically conservative?]
>
> They generally tend to be more conservative, but many other factors come
> into play.  For instance, if the Jameld-speakers interacted with
> speakers of other languages, those languages could heavily influence
> their language.
...and they did interact a lot.

>
> > but some verbs retain the final -e for reasons of euphony, as
> > in vegne.
>
> Any rules to predict when -e is kept?  Perhaps if the stem ends in a
> stop followed by another sound (as in vegn-)?
Exactly that - certain consonant clusters require that the -e is kept, and
it's also usually kept after r, g and j.


> >  Past (perfect)      -mä    I sneezed: Me nësmä
>
> In verbs like _vegnen_, is the -e retained?  In other words, would the
> past tense be _vegnemä_?  _Vegnmä_ would seem to be a hard word to
> pronounce.
Yes, it would be _vegnemä_, for just that reason. It would be dropped after
r though, so "she declared" would be "es biklérmä", not "es bikléremä". It's
only to make things like _hat~szmä_ more pronouncable. (sp?)


> > Mainly as in English.
>
> No V2 structure?
I think I know what you mean, but give me a couple of examples.

James

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james@zolid.com  James Campbell  Zeugma--Our Life Is Design  www.zolid.com
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