Re: Lenition or Elision or What?

And Rosta wrote:
> caeruleancentaur, On 08/12/2005 17:46:
>
>> There is a phonetic phenomenon in Senjecan that occurs when the
>> personal pronoun nominative + the present tense marker are prefixed to
>> a verbnoun with an initial vowel.
>>
>> m-i-ât-a /mi'at_da/
>> 1sg.-pres.-go-indic.
>> I go.
>>
>> This becomes mïâta. m_j'at_da
>>
>> Is there a proper name for this phenomenon?  It doesn't seem to me to
>> be either lenition (as David Crystal defines it) or elision.
>
>
> 'Synizesis' is the collapse of two heterosyllabic vowels into a
> homosyllabic sequence of vowel + glide or glide + vowel.
Gosh, that takes me back nearly 50 years till the time I was a young
classicist in the 6th Form     :-)


Yep - I had forgotten the term, but I've checked it out in my Greek
grammar. I note that Crystal does not list the term in his "A Dictionary
of Linguistics and Phonetics".

>Also  'synaeresis'.
Phonetically, synizesis and synaeresis and the same thing - and they
certainly describe the feature Charlie gives. The difference is in the
_written_ form. If the collapse or coalescence of the two vowels is
marked in writing it is _synaeresis_ (which I guess our LeftPondian
cousins spell _syneresis_); if the coalescence is not shown in writing
then it is called _synizesis_ - so strictly whether Charlie refers to
this as syn(a)eresis or synizesis will depend on how Senjecan is written.

Tho it must be said that in modern terminology, synizesis is often used
to denote the spoken phenomenon, no matter how it is written. I quote
Sidney Allen (Vox Graeca):
"In modern terminology 'synizesis' is often used in the sense of a
reduction of the first vowel of a sequence to a semivowel (as e/g. [u]
--> [w] in colloquial English _How do I look?_ --> trisyllabic
[haudwailuk]"

> Samprasarana' is alternation between glide and syllabic
> forms of a vocoid.
Not Greek this time - I assume it's Sanskrit. Yet another term not
listed by Crystal in his 'dictionary'. But in any case this does not
apply to the feature Charlie's Senjecan.

> 'Coalescence' is when a sequence of two segments
> fuses into a single segment. So the Senjecan phenomenon might be called
> 'coalescent synizesis' or 'synizetic coalescence'.
Um - excuse me if I seem a bit thick (I have a bit of a cold), but does
both synizesis and synaeresis imply coalescence by their very
definition. There seems to be a bit of redundancy here.
==================================

caeruleancentaur wrote:
 > There is a phonetic phenomenon in Senjecan that occurs when the
 > personal pronoun nominative + the present tense marker are prefixed to
 > a verbnoun with an initial vowel.
 >
 > m-i-ât-a /mi'at_da/
 > 1sg.-pres.-go-indic.
 > I go.
 >
 > This becomes mïâta. m_j'at_da
 >
 > Is there a proper name for this phenomenon?

Yep - synizesis (or syn(a)eresis), see above.

 >It doesn't seem to me to be either lenition (as David Crystal defines
iit)

In fact in Crystal's rather vague definition "A term used in phonology
to refer to a weakening in the overall strength of a sound...." it would
seem to cover your feature. But, quite rightly, he goes on to talk about
consonants. The term is most frequently used as an alternative term for
the 'soft mutation' of the insular Celtic langs, and of conlangs such as
Sindarin & Brithenig. It would certainly be misleading IMO to use it to
denote synizesis.

 >or elision.

Indeed, not - otherwise the [i] or the [u] would disappear completely.

--
Ray
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