Re: a few questions

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 02:00:43AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Trebor Jung scripsit:
>
> > How did Estonian lose vowel harmony? And how does vowel harmony appear
> > in a language at all?
>
> Here's another question: is there any living language in which
> vowol harmono is actually still operating?  In Turkish and Finnish, at
> least, borrowings routinely violate it.
Finnish doesn't necessarily violate vowel harmony in this case. Most
loans fitting a certain prosodic structure are often re-analyzed as
quasi-compounds (even though they're not). Mostly they can take either
front or back suffixes. So 'architect' goes in as _arkkitehti_
(arkki/tehti: both parts meaningless), the essive can be either
_arkkitehtina_ or _arkkitehtinä_.

On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 09:44:24PM -0400, Trebor Jung wrote:
> Where do Estonian's three degrees of length come from? Does every
> phoneme have three degrees of length? Aren't there alot of ambiguity
> since only short and long - and not so-called 'overlong' too - are
> indicated in the orthography?
Yes, there is ambiguity, but that's not so much a problem. Note that
Estonian often employs certain adverbs to compensate (mainly to
replace the progressive/perfective distinction of the
partitive/genitive).

Loss of final vowels mostly. The exact historical details are most
likely still being studied, however according to some research the long
(quantity 2) degree is the new kid in the block. That is to say, an
earlier form of the language had only Q1 and Q3.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 01:26:13AM -0400, David Peterson wrote:
> As far as the nouns go, which words will have overlong consonants is
> completely predictable, so it doesn't need to be marked in the
> orthography.
> By "completely predictable", I mean if you have, say, the nominative
> singular form of a noun, you can predict, depending on whether its
> stop is singleton, geminate or overlong, that certain other forms will
> be the opposite, and it's always the same forms.
Yes, you will be able to predict in the spoken language, but you won't
be able to predict their pronunciation for certain morphological forms
in the orthography. The offending forms are the genitive singular,
partitive singular and occassionally the short illative (aditive), and
possibly the partitive plural (however this case often has one or more
alternatives):

kool  [ko::l] (nominative.sg) "school"
kooli [ko:li] (genitive.sg)
kooli [ko::li] (partitive.sg)
kooli [ko:l:i] (aditive.sg) (I'm not too sure about the [o:].)

or

laul  [laul:]  (nom.sg) "song"
laulu [laulu]  (gen.sg)
laulu [lau:lu] (part.sg)
laulu [laul:u] (aditive.sg)

Orthographical genuises. ;)

--
vehke.