Re: Nimrina phonology

Herman Miller skrev:
> Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>> Herman Miller skrev:
>>> Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>>>> Nice.  Do /K/ ~ /l/ also pattern as a voiceless-voiced pair?
>>>
>>> Currently, yes: ríva "yellow" + hlázi "tea" = rívalázi "green tea".
>>
>> Nice!  Maybe /l7 has an [K\] allophone?
Gag! The slash is at SHIFT-7 on the Swedish keyboard,
hence I write |7| where I intend |/| sometimes, but you
seem not to have thought that I intended a close mid back
unrounded vowel! :-)

>
> 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.

>> So what kind of people speak Nimrína?  I hope I haven't
>> influenced your thought in some unwanted direction by this
>> bit of trivia!
>
> I've been thinking about that over the last couple days, and I've come
> to the conclusion that the speakers belong to a secretive race of people
> with fox-tails, best known in Scandinavia, where they inspired the
> legends of the "huldre".
Oh, that!  There is a very suggestive scene with the huldra in
the Swedish seventies comedy "The Apple War".  Gustav Sandgren's
short story "Johannes och huldran", as read on the radio by
Max von Sydow, was an influential experience for me.

You should get everything covered if you google for
"skogsrå OR skogsfru OR huldra OR huldre OR huldrefolk OR huldufolk OR
huldufólk"
especially the Wikipedia article.(*)  It should be noted that
the stories of the Norwegian stories of the huldre marrying
a mortal are always referred to a *troll* girl in Sweden.
The Icelandic huldufólk are essentially something else,
perhaps influenced by the Irish gentry, although the name
"the hidden one(s)" is the same, and the Norwegian huldrefolk
seems to be a mixture of the Icelandic and the Swedish concept.
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! :-)
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.

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.

(*) Make sure you go to the *English* wikipedia article
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldra>.  The Swedish is a
stub and unlinked to the English, which is quite good.
There are some interesting pictures too, if you like
the idea of 'foxy' redheads in dewy Swedish summer meadows.
You can see why she remains a popular notion here! :-)

--
/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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