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

>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?

>   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?)

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.)

I'm curious about something.  Is there precedent for having geminate vowels
in a language without having geminate consonants as well?  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?

Isidora

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