Re: Lenition or Elision or What?

Hi!

R A Brown <ray@...> writes:
> 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".
Hmm, but that's not exactly it.  It is not [mjat_da] but [m_jat_da].
It's not a glide, it's become palatalisation (or velarisation for
/u/), so not /i/+/a/ have combined into [ja], but /m/+/i/ into [m_j]
in this case.

What about 'yer-mutation' or 'yerization' :-)))?  It happened in
Slavic, no (hence 'yer')?  [u] > [_w] and [i] > [_j] under certain
constraints (cf. 'yer-y' ond 'yer-u').

**Henrik

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