Re: Metathesis?

Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> Does anyone know languages that extensively use metathesis?
Leti and Timorese (Atoni) of eastern Indonesia; plus others in E. IN. even
less often discussed... and Rotuman (Oceanic). Not to mention Kash (purely a
sandhi phenomenon involving r+C-- nimbur 'remember' + to 'future' > nimbutro
'will remember').
>
> Does anyone have pointers to papers that examine metathesis?
If you go here-- http://roa.rutgers.edu/index.php3 -- and search for
_keyword: metathesis_ you'll call up 5 papers, two of which, by Eliz. Hume,
deal with Leti. Also one on Georgian, and a couple on Tagalog et al. which
I've never investigated.  Hume's papers are heavily oriented toward
Optimality Theory and use a lot of unexplained jargon/abbreviations :-(((

Met. in Leti seems most motivated by preferences for vowel deletion and
permissible clustering (perhaps originally motivated by fast speech rules,
as one writer claimed for a related lang.) e.g. a form like "ulit" 'skin'
will occur in some environments, alternate "ulti" in others. (IIRC sort of,
ulit + CVCV... vs. ulti + CCVCV)

Some of the other IN languages I'm familiar with use met. to "bind" various
consituents together-- e.g. pers.prefixes+verb (Yamdena mu '2s' + davar
'open' > mdwavar 'you open') or compounds (Yamd. kai- 'tree' + CVCV
'descriptive N or Adj.' > kaCyVCV 'a tree name') (Leti does this too).

Nicolaus Himmelmann has written a bit on met. in Timorese, publ. in various
Pacific Linguistics (ANU) volumes. In some cases, met. there is similar to
that in Leti (phonologically motivated), but in many cases it serves to
derive new forms, e.g. teun '3', ktenu 'third' IIRC. I can't locate my
copies at present :-(  Himmelmann has a website with bibliog. and online
papers, but I don't know if these are included.  You might be able to puzzle
out some of it from my wordlist at
http://cinduworld.tripod.com/indonesica.htm

Rotuman, amazingly IMO, is quite similar to Timorese, but even more
complexly developed-- my impression is it has to do with transitive vs.
intransitve forms and/or definite vs. indefinite. I know it creates a lot of
new vowels whose phonemic status is debatable-- e.g. a hypothetical form
like "hatu" > "hOt" presumably via **haut, whereas other forms simply
metathesize CVCV > CVVC. I think there's a fair amount published, but hidden
away in conference proceedings (the various vols. of Intl. Conf. on
Austronesian Linguistics Nos. 1-8 or 9) and also in Pacific Linguistics;
perhaps some in Oceanic Linguistics (U.Hawaii, and a little more widely
distributed than the ANU's stuff.)

There's an old grammar of Rotuman by Churchward IIRC, or perhaps Geo.Milner;
as I recall it doesn't really explain the phenom too well. Similarly a
grammar of Timorese by P.Middelkoop (in Dutch, "Proeve van een timorees
grammatica" or some such) in Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde,
1950. That's a journal you ought to be able to find easily in Europe-- he
too glosses over the phenom, even as he cites example after example of it.
Molto frustrating!!

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