Re: a few questions

Trebor 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?>>

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.

<<How did Estonian lose vowel harmony? And how does vowel harmony appear in a
language at all?>>

Can't answer your first question, but as for your second, let's say you have
a suffix /-a/.
Now let's say you have words like /meden/ and /kalas/.   If you suffix the
vowel, you
get /medena/ and /kalasa/.   Over the years, the /a/-ness of the /-a/ suffix
in /medena/
might get lost to the ears of listeners, so that that /-a/ suffix slowly
gravitates upwards
and becomes /-e/.   I guess the theory behind this would be that you're
already getting
two strong /e/ signals from the word, and so those signals kind of carry over
(in your
brain, not in your ear) to the /-a/ suffix.   It'd be nice to see a paper on
the historical
evolution of a vowel harmony system, though.   Anybody know of one?

<<Are there terms similar to 'dual' and 'trial' for numbers four-ten? If so,
what are they?>>

Tetral, quinqual, sextal, septal, octal, etc.   (Can some of the Latin
learners
verify these?)

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Reply