Re: THEORY: more questions

Carsten Becker scripsit:

>   a.. open/close syllables
Roughly, an open syllable is one that ends in a vowel, whereas closed
syllables end in consonants.  Most languages restrict or even prohibit
closed syllables; English, as often the oddball, actually favors them.

>   b.. oblique (as an aspect or mood or so)
"Oblique" refers to cases other than the nominative case.  In languages
that have only one such case, like Old French, it may actually be
called the oblique case.

>   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.

>   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.  (Often the following vowel gets
lost, as in English "men", German "maenner" from Common Gmc "*manniz".)

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.  (The word "otter" is Common Gmc,
and its "o" reflects a-umlaut when compared with Latin _lutra_;
the source of the Latin "l" is not known.)

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.

In the Romance languages, similar processes are usually called "apophony".

Finally, of course the diaeresis symbol (two dots above) is used for
other things in other languages.

>   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@]. Or sometimes,
>   <chs> is pronounced [k_s], and sometimes [xs]. Is it because of some
>   sound changes during the middle ages?
Yes, indeed.

--
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