Re: Status of Italian rising

Excuse me, Roger... yesterday evening the answer I was working at literally
slipped out of my hands... anyway there are news about my query. Indeed
Maurzio Gavioli, an Italian offlist conlanger, made me notice that my
explanation worked pretty well with [w], which can in fact be considered
vocalic in nature, while doesn't with [j], which really seems to be
consonantal. As always, things are fuzzier than expected;-)

Onto the answer...

>>Under the functional POV, indeed, only considering [j] and [w] vocoids
>>lacking sillabicity not only when they immediately follow the syllabic
>>sonority peak (falling diphthongs) but also when they precede it (rising
>>diphthongs), would allow us to mantain the traditional simple explanation
>of
>>the conditions governing the allomorphy of masculine determinative
article:
>>[il] and [lo] both show up before contoids (under certain given conditions
>>we may skip for our purposes);
>>[l] shows up before all of the vocoids, both syllabic
>>({ART}{unico}>['luniko]) and asyllabic ones ({ART}{uomo}> ['lwO.mo]).
>>[u] and [w], as you may see, behave the same way, both as vocoids,
>>determining the eligibility of [l] as article. We could consider them
>>allophones of the same phoneme /u/, showing up in different syntagmatic
>>contexts characterized by two different suprasegmental structure:
>>input: /u.ni.ko/ vs. /uO.mo/
>>output: [uniko] vs. [wOmo]
>>When /u/ is a syllabic nucleus [u] appears; otherwise we get [w].
>
>Just a thought:  in an abstract sense, the [wo] is just the open-syllable
>allophone of the phoneme /O/, so in some sense perhaps the [w] isn't really
>"there"? (This may be historically true, but isn't very convincing, is it?)
>My little pocket dictionary gives only 3 words with uo-:  uomo, (all')uopo,
>uovo; none with u plus any other vowel.  So something strange is going on
>with [w-] in Italian.  (And of course Latin /w/ "v" shifted to Ital. /v/.)
I suppose I already answered this... [O] appears in open syllables, as
well. /O/>[wO] in open stressed syllables was once an allophonic variation,
but it's not anymore, nowadays. See [kO.sa], for instance (note: I'm giving
you samples from the Standard language... intervocalic /s/ is (almost)
always [z] in my variety- I say [kO.za]). Also see that the condition "in
open _stressed_ syllables" is not valid anymore: until the first half of
this century grammars recomended to shift _uo_ to _o_ when it happened to
lose stress: _suono_ ['swOno] "I play", but _sonare_ [so'nare]. Everybody
says [swo'nare], nowadays, thou'.

>Are there in fact any native Ital. words with [jV-]?  In my dictionary,
>there are very few words with "iV-", most of them learned, like iato
>'hiatus' or iodio 'iodine', ione 'ion', and of course io 'I'-- somehow I
>doubt that these are pronounced [jV...] but rather with a distinct [i]
>syllable of their own. So the " l' before glides" rule isn't necessary
>there.  (And of course Latin /j/ usually > Ital. /dZ/)
_iodio_ is [jO.djo]. I have to thank you, because this word has made me
notice that my theorical construction worked for [w] only, and not for [j]:

{ART}+{iodio} > [lo'jOdjo], for most speakers. [ljOdjo] is not completely
disallowed, but it sounds really strange. Google found over 1400 "lo iodio"
vs. only 21 "l'iodio", for instance.


>>If we considered [j] and [w] approximants, the abovementioned rule should
>be
>>rewritten, getting a bit less straightforward:
>>[il] and [lo] both show up before all of the contoids except the
>>approximants /j/ and /w/;
>>[l] shows up before all of the vocoids, but also before the approximants
>/j/
>>and /w/.
>>This description would also introduce the distinction between 4 different
>>phonemes, /i/, /j/, /u/ and /w/, where 2 (/i/ and /w/) would work.
>
>I don't see the problem, and don't see that any unnecessary distinction is
>being made-- you do need phonemic /j/ and /w/ in a few other places, after
>all (as in piano, pieno, quanto, questo etc.-- isn't it true that all the
>sequences of [w] plus vowels other than [o] occur only after /k/  "q" and
>/g/ ?)
Well, we do not necessarily need them. We could think about [wo] as the
output of an underlying /uo/, as well as we do already consider [aj] the
output of an underlying [ai]. This would apparently allow us to get rid of
one superfluous phoneme, /w/. As I said above, [j] really seems to behave
as a consonant, and would call for a phonemic /j/ =/= /i/.


Luca

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