YANPT (was: Re: Weekly Vocab #1.1.3 (repost #1))

taliesin the storyteller skrev:
> * Lars Finsen said on 2006-09-13 16:00:03 +0200
>> I'd like to contribute with words from my conlangs too. Maybe this is
>> last week's, but since new ones aren't posted yet...
>
> Hi and welcome! Another Norwegian, huh? Goody, that way we might be
> enough to fill the list with discussions of minute points of Norwegian
> grammar, finally a possibility for YANPTs and YANGTs :)
I'll take that as an invitation to ask about the extent, nature and
impact of /S/ > /s\/ in Norwegian, since someone asked me about it
the other day (poor Englisher who couldn't hear the difference between
[s`] and [s\] in Swedish accents that have [s`] for /x\/, and stupid
me volunteered the infoid that there actually is such merger in
Norwegian but not AFAIK in native speakers' Swedish.)

Which of the two phonemes merges into which?
   Is it always the same direction?
   Do all instances of one phoneme merge into the
     other or is the result a complementary distribution.
How big is the functional load of the lost distinction.
How old is this merger? (AFAIU it is ongoing)
Is it geographically or socially restricted?  If so how?
Is it stigmatized?  I would expect it to be...

(And yes, I recommended the guy to use [S] for _sj_ etc. and
[tS] for _tj/kj/k{front vowel}_ when speaking Swedish.  Would
have been cruel otherwise! :-)

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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