Re: Quantity shift (was: Re: Native grammatical terms)

At 06:38 20.11.2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>At 02:03 PM 11/19/03 +0100, you wrote:
>>At 03:02 19.11.2003, John Cowan wrote:
>>
>>>Well, it's not unknown for sound changes to be perfectly "smooth",
>>>as in Old Norse > Icelandic.
>>
>>Not really.  A lot of ON assonances don't make sense
>>any more, and the quantity shift has messed up the rythm
>>quite often -- there are no actual short syllables
>>anymore.
>
>How does something like this work?  The practical problem I have is
>probably more the reverse.  I think that I am am starting with a
>proto-language with both short and long vowels, and I want to entirely get
>rid of the length distinction by the time I get down to the modern
>language, leaving the language with only short vowels (or maybe only long
>ones if it doesn't matter.)  There is a weight distinction in syllables in
>the modern language, with syllables containing a coda being heavy for
>purposes of moving the stress around.  (This is not the same language as
>the thread started out on, BTW.  This one is Trehelo.)
>
>Isidora
Old Scandinavian, including Old Norse, had syllable
codas with the following basic quantity patterns:

V
VC
VCC
V:
V:C
V:CC

where VC/V is termed short, V:CC overlong and V:/VCC/V:C long.
The quantity shift basically meant that short and overlong
syllables were removed.  This was done by turning VC into
either VCC or V:C (in Icelandic only V:C), and V:CC into VCC,
and the very rare V into V:.  In the new pattern the
only licit patterns are V: V:C and VCC, so that a syllable
can have a short vowel only if this is followed by more than
one consonant, which may be a geminate.  This pattern is
still preserved in Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese,
while Danish has re-acquired VC by degemination.
There are also dialects which have not undergone the
quantity shift, notably in the North of Sweden and Norway
and in Swedish Finland.



/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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