Re: Grammatical metathesis

Trebor Jung wrote:

> I know some conlangs like Mark Rosenfelder's Kebreni use grammatical
> metathesis. Do any natlangs?
>
At least two that I know of, but I don't know the details.  (1) Rotuman
(Oceania, grammar in Engl. by either Churchward or Milner) and (2) Atoni
(~Dawan/Timorese) of Timor, Indonesia (the one grammar available, in Dutch,
doesn't discuss metathesis despite countless examples in the text, which
suggests that the author, like me, was at a loss to explain when and why it
occurred...).

As I recall, the Rotuman grammar uses "Construct case" as one use of
metathesis there.  If you can find the journal "Lingua" in a good library,
there is a paper on Rotuman in Vol. 14 or 15 (both were devoted to SE
Asia/Pacific studies). I don't know where my copy is....:-((((

Typical examples in Atoni:
teon 'three', tenu? 'third' note that the proto-form is *telu
usi 'ancestor' neno 'day, sun' : uis neno 'the (native) Sky-god, the
Christian God'
hiut 'seven' < *pitu
aop 'pregnant' : na/apus 'made (X) pregnant'

In some cases, met. in Atoni appears to be motivated by considerations of
sentence rhythm/phonological grouping, with a stylistic preference for
sequences of ...VCCV..., (even though the underlying/historical structure is
CVCV)-- according to a recent paper. Perhaps variants of this sort are seen
in the citation of both plain and metathesized forms-- e.g. simo, siom
'receive'.

Both in Rotuman and Atoni, the procedure seems to involve metathesis of
C1-V1-C2-V2 > C1-V1-V2-C2.  In Atoni, if V1 is a low vowel, a +high V2 is
lowered (as in tenu/teon); in Rotuman, IIRC, it goes even further, with
V1-V2 often coalescing into another vowel altogether, with the result that
the inventory of apparently phonemic vowels is very large, including front
rounded vowels, low /&/ and /O/ etc-- completely unexpected in a language
that is generally held to belong in the Fiji-Polynesian subgroup, where only
*/a e i o u/ are reconstructed.

It's a thoroughly weird phenomenon, and although both languages are
Austronesian, they are so widely separated in linguistic time and space that
it has to be viewed as an independent development in both cases.

Other languages in the general Timor area also use metathesis, but there
seems to be a valid historical explanation-- rules of epenthesis (adding an
echo-vowel to preserve original final C) and syncope (deletion of the old
V2), i.e. from *(k)ulit 'skin' you derive **úlit-i then úl0t-i, so that
forms like ulti and ulit both occur (in different environments) in the
modern languages.  Linguists with actual experience with these languages
seem to feel that _synchronically_ metathesis is a better explanation for
what's going on.  But still, it seems to have an entirely different origin
than what's seen in Atoni.

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