Re: Using word generators (was Re: Semitic root word list?)

>On 1/10/07, Jonathan Knibb wrote:
> > I'm sure there are examples of languages with phonemes
> > restricted to loans, of which some probably only occur in unusual and
> > even perhaps ad-hoc loans, but I don't know any off the top of my head.
> > (Urdu from Arabic? Welsh from English?)
>
>I think Finnish has this with voiced stops.
>
>IIRC /d/ exists as a development of something else, but /g/ and /b/
>are present only in loans (native Finnish words, and older loans, only
>have /k/ and /p/). Note that |ng|, while occurring in native Finnish
>words, is /N:/ or thereabouts, rather than anything with /g/ in it.
>
>I presume John Vertical will know more.
>
>Cheers,
>--
>Philip Newton
Well since you asked... yes, Modern Finnish and its erlier stages of
development are good examples of this phenomenon. Inherited /d/ in Standard
Finnish (itself a standardization-introduced artificial compromise -
dialects use mostly /0 r/, some /D l/) has - let's just say: a very limited
distribution. Any instances outside of this distribution, as well as all
instances of /b g f S/, occur only in loanwords. /S/ is the rarest of these,
and consequently its status is less certain than that of the other four;
most peepl substitute /s/. Similarly, substitution of /p t k v\/ for /b d g
f/ in loanwords was still the rule only a few centuries ago, and still is in
rural areas.

All initial consonant clusters and some medial ones (frex /rst ls:/) also
occur only in loans.

/e: 2: o:/ may have only occured in loanwords at some stage, too, but that
is hard to tell, as elision of */G/ and other stuff (which produced new
instances of these long vowels) progressed in phases, over maybe even a
millenia...

Then there're initial-syllable /2/ and initial /r/, which occur - besides
loanwords - only in onomatopoeia and their derivations, but the
chronological order is again not very clear.

I'm not sure what exactly an "ad-hoc loan" is.

John Vertical

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