Re: THEORY: more questions

Carsten Becker/John Cowan wrote:
>
> >   d.. I deleted all those "Weekly Vocab" Mails, but then I saw these
> >   mails are aids for inventing words ... a discipline I'm not very
> >   good in, too. How can I tell the server to send me all those first
> >   "Weekly Vocab" mails from 1 to the current number (30)?
>
> The server has no such capabilities.
>
Muke Tever has been archiving some if not all of them at his website, but I
don't have the URL..........Perhaps that would be a good addition to Daniel
Andreasson's www.conlanglinks.tk .  I also have most of this year's batch
saved, but you'd have to delete the Kash text.

> >   g.. What is an "umlaut"? I'm German, so there are umlauts in my native
> >   language, but I saw this already in other contexts than German /a/
> >   > /E/, /o/ > /2/, /u/ > /y/ (a>ä, o>ö, u>ü). How does umlauting work
> >   for other vowels or does it work for other vowels at all?
>
> Umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is altered because of the influence
> of a vowel in a following syllable.
In general, a form of _assimilation_, the tendency for sounds in adjacent
syllables to become more alike, a very common phenomenon in phonology.  It
was the original cause of the Gmc. umlauts; when the conditioning vowel or
ending was lost or reduced to schwa, the process became grammaticalized;
i.e. *manniz > männiz [mEniz] was still visibly a plural form mann+iz IIRC;
but in later **männiz > männ@r (or Engl. men) the umlaut by itself is now
the mark of the plural-- I may have the details wrong, but the principle is
correct.

> There are three types of umlaut recognized in Germanistics:  i-umlaut,
> or fronting, which is the type you describe; u-umlaut, or rounding;
> a-umlaut, or lowering.  I-umlaut is still functional in German and visible
> in the other Gmc languages; u-umlaut was in decay even in Old Norse;
> and a-umlaut was frozen and forgotten.
These changes can take place without affecting the grammatical status of the
word, merely changing the phonetic shape of the word.  In many Polynesian
languages, original *a--u > either o--u  or  a--o, similarly *a--i > either
a--e or e--i (it's a common but sporadic process in Polynesian).

> There is a potential confusion here between a-umlaut as the name of a
> letter, and a-umlaut as the name of a process (ditto for u-umlaut); all
> the current German umlaut letters are a result of the i-umlaut process.
>
> >   h.. The optional question that I actually should be able to look up
> >   on the internet myself if I'd know where: Why is German e.g. <ei>
> >   pronounced [aj], <eu> and <äu> [oj] and <ie> [i:]? Or even more odd,
> >   /a_u/ changes to /oj/ in the plural: [ha_us] > ["hojz@].
Yes.  The sounds of the language changed, the writing system didn't.

"eu, äu" = [oj] is interesting, an example of what's known as "misphasing of
roundness".  It's fairly rare. You have an original  sequence of

[low front unround V] [high back round vowel/glide]

changing to:

[low back round V] [high front unr. V/glide]-- you can see which features
have switched places.

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