Re: Nimrina phonology

Herman Miller skrev:
> Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
>>> I wóuld like to get [K\] involved somehow. Voiced stops have
>>> fricative allophones, as in /dmázi/ [Dma:z_ji] "blue-green".
>>> Possibly /nidlu/ "violet" could be [n_jidK\u]. Or another
>>> possibility could be lengthened /l/ between vowels.
>>
>> Maybe both /dl/ > [Dl] > [K\] *and* [l:] > [K\].  Again the kind of
>>  thing that would happen in a natlang.  BTW if you have *G > zero,
>>  you can have the fricative allophone of /g/ also be zero.  Cf.
>> Welsh where *G > zero but /w/v/D/ are preserved.  Also modern
>> Danish which in the course of the last century merged its [G]
>> allophone of /g/ with /j/ or the [w] allophone of /v/ depending on
>>  the backness of the preceding vowel, much like in Old English as I
>>  wrote of yesterday.
>
> I was thinking I already had /dl/ > [K\] in one of my languages, but
>  I can't find it, and there's no reason not to reuse it even if I do.
>  What I might be remembering is /tl/ > [K] in Zharranh.
I know the feeling, though I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand I don't want to repeat myself, but OTOH
a real-world language wouldn't go out of its way to avoid
being dissimilar to another language -- except maybe for
some sociolinguistic reasons in a language contact situation.
Rather a phonetic simplification is likely to happen in many
unrelated languages.

> But certainly with [D] as an allophone of /d/ in cases like /dm/,
> /dr/, the /dl/ > [Dl] > [K\:] development would make sense.
FWIW Zulu orthography uses |dl| for [K\].  I don't know
whether it reflects a phonological or historical fact, or
merely exploits a hole in the phonotactics.
See <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zulu.htm>.

> Phonemically, maybe the best way to represent it is /l:/ (or /ll/).
Or maybe it still is /dl/!  BTW if Nimrína is
supposed in Scandinavia -- *here* or somewhere
*else* -- it might be a good touch to have an
[r`] allophone of /l/, since [r`] for historical
reasons functions as an allophone of /l/ in many
Swedish and Norwegian dialects.  At some point
/rD/ became [r`], and at some later point this
/r`/ and /l/ merged in some or all positions,
leaving [r`] as the *only* allophone of /l/ in
many dialects.  (I myself have for some reason
[r`] for /l/ only after labials, and [d`] for
*/rD/!)  The putative presence in Scandinavia of
a language without an r/l distinction may serve
to 'explain' these strange historical mergers! :-)

As for the use of doubling to indicate length in
phone*ic transcription it does for some reason seem
common to use length marks for vowels but doubling
for consonants. For languages like Swedish and
Italian this actually makes sense phonemically, and
historically also for other Germanic languages
including English, where stressed vowels were long
in open syllables but short in closed syllables.
However you mentioned the other day that since
Nimrína has many vowel combinations it might make
sense to use doubling for long vowels it would
seem to make sense to use doubling also for
consonants, but ultimately it may depend on
whether long consonants are underlyingly to
be seen as clusters, or if they are the result
of prosodic processes.

>> In particular there seems to be males of the kindred in Norway,
>> which is never the case in Sweden, where huldran is more of a
>> female demon luring horny young men to perish in the woods. On the
>>  whole the Norwegian huldre shows herself to be more domesticable,
>>  having a cow rather than fox tail and all! :-)
>
> Considering the variety of human hair color, length, curliness and so
>  on, there are probably similar variations in tail features. Maybe
> the cow-tailed huldre speak a distantly related language.
The differences between the Norwegian and Swedish
descriptions suggest to me one agrarian cow-tailed
(sub)species and one fox-tailed hunter-gatherer
(sub)species.

> The absence of males in Swedish legend could simply be a result of
> the rarity of encountering one in the first place.
Yes, or maybe there is greater morphological difference
between the sexes in huldrer than in humans, e.g. the
males may be wholly fur-coated while the females are
partially naked and so more human-like.  This may
cause humans not to recognize that they are the same
species. It might also mean that while the females
appear sexually enticing to humans the males don't,
and are perhaps not perceived as human-like at all.
More on that below.

>> It should be noted that there are variants of the hollow back where
>>  the back looks like bark or is hairy, which are perhaps easier to
>>  make biological sense of (bark = coarse or gray skin).  Especially
>>  a species which is naked in the face and the front/under side of
>> the torso but hairy otherwise seems like a biological possibility.
>
> Yes, how would they stand upright with a hollow back? I like the idea
>  of the rough or hairy back better. It could be both hairy and look
> like bark, I guess -- a coloration pattern in the hair.
In "The Apple War" they went for the rotten bark version,
complete with crawling bugs.  Probably a technical issue,
since that was long before computer generated images.

I can't help think of images I've seen of American Indians
wearing wolf skins with the wolf's head as a hood and the
tail hanging down their back.  In Norse tradition there is
the _úlfheðinn_, a berserk in hairy wolfskin jacket.  There
are archeological finds depicting such figures, looking
like men with wolfs head and tail(*).  Maybe this is the male
of the species.  The thought that the male of the species
is behind the belief in werewolves would not be too great
a leap!  There is _huldumaðr_ 'cairn-troll' in my Old Norse
to Norwegian dictionary, but that would seem to relate
primarily to the Irish-influenced Icelandic huldufólk.

>> What d you think of the idea that _huld(r)a_ is an attempt to adapt
>>  a Nimrína word [hudK\a]? :-).
>>
>> FYI all of _huldra/huldre/huldu/_ are derivable from the past
>> participle of the Old Norse verb _hylja_ 'conceal', but it seems
>> strange that the genitive plural _huldra_ should prevail as a base
>>  form in Swedish and Norwegian.
>
> I don't think that's a good idea if the Icelandic huldufólk are
> something else entirely. I guess it's probably not likely that humans
>  know what the Nimrína speakers call themselves in any case.
True.  Also the Norse/Germanic etymology of the word is wholly
transparent.  See <http://www.northvegr.org/vigfusson/292.php>
(_HULD_ and the following entries) and
<http://www.northvegr.org/vigfusson/304.php> (hylja) for the
relevant dictionary entries.

In the modern languages Swedish has _huldra, pl. huldror_,
which is exclusively feminine, while Norwegian has two
alternative singulars _huldre, pl. huldrer_ and _hulder,
pl. huldre(r)_; while _hulder_ would look like a
masculine it in fact designates the female being.  As I
said these modern forms derive from the genitive plural
(which was the same for all geneders) of _huliðr_, the
past participle of _hylja_.  Presumably the reason for
this development is the fact that the genitive plural
was common as the first component in compounds.

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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