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

At 21:50 20.11.2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:

>>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.
>
>Thank you for this information.  I'll have to see if I can use it in some
>way to get rid of the length distinction in Trehelish.  It looks like there
>are still short and long vowels, though, even if the syllables all have the
>same weight.  Is that the case?
Yes.  Syllable-final vowels and vowels before a single
short word-final consonant are long if they are stressed.

>>   This pattern is
>>still preserved in Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese,
>>while Danish has re-acquired VC by degemination.
>
>What can you tell me about this degemination?  Were both the consonants and
>the vowels simply degeminated?  (And, if they weren't, how can I be so
>stupid as to speak Danish without ever having noticed a length distinction
>in either consonants or vowels?)
A geminate is by definition a sequence of two identical
consonants.  Danish has both long and short vowels.
Degemination caused it to have also short vowels
followed by single/short consonants, which it had
earlier gotten rid of.  There have happened other
more recent changes with vowels before "voiced fricatives"
and /R/, so that at least Copenhagen dialect is
losing the length distinction in this context.

>With Trehelish, I would like to have a degemination process, but it would
>certainly be nice to have some natural model to get a sense of things.  I
>need to entirely eliminate all geminates in the modern language, but I
>think that I need them there in the proto-language to create some of the
>modern phonemes and phonotactic constraints (or lack thereof.)
FWIW the Zagreb dialect of Croatian has apparently
lost all distinctions of vowel length and tone
quite traceless in all contexts.  People just
stopped to make the distinctions, or rather the
younger speakers failed to acquire them.

>I'm curious about something.  Is there precedent for having geminate vowels
>in a language without having geminate consonants as well?
Long vowels without any geminate consonants is quite frequent.

>In this case, I
>am thinking about the parent language of Trehelish.  I assume that there
>would be no question about having geminate vowels and no geminate
>consonants in a language such as Nidirino, which allows only open syllables?
You can still have long vowels in open syllables.

>Isidora

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