Quantity shift (was: Re: Native grammatical terms)
| From: | Isidora Zamora <isidora@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, November 20, 2003, 5:38 |
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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
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