Re: derivation help?

Clinton Moreland-Stringham wrote:
> What I've been doing is taking Old irish words, deriving them in my
> head to what I think they should be, and then backtracking to how I
> got there.
Interesting method.

>     OI. odb 'knot in wood' > A. ydh
Is {y} =3D /y/?

>        -svarabhakti (OI. db pronounced /Dv/ >/Div/)
What's svarabhakti?

>     OI.salann 'salt' > A. sal
>         - simplification of final C or cluster
>         - loss of final C
Perhaps sepecifically loss of nasals, possibly through an intermediate
nasalization?

>     OI. dobur 'water' > A. d=FAr (u with acute accent =3D long)
>         - b>w/V_V
>         - simplification of vowel cluster (owu>=FA)
Hmm, seems to me that /owu/ --> /ow/ --> /o:/ would be more likely?

>     OI.  an=E1l (anaal) 'breath' > A. an
>         -loss of finals as normal
>                  But what about that long a? Only short vowels are lost=
 normally.
> Maybe an earlier rule that shortens long vowels in the final, nonacc sy=
llable? Of
> course, all non-initial syll are nonaccented, so...
Well, if you're having trouble with that word, perhaps you might want to
just make it _an=E1_.  But, if you really want to keep what you have,
final vowels becoming short is a reasonable rule.

>         - vocalization of /X/ (as in Old English)
>         - diphthongization of V (a>ae) OR lengthening of V (a>aa/=E1)
>         which makes more sense in terms of treatment of that vowel? and=
 how come the
> finals weren't lost? Which derivation do you like more?
Personally, I'd prefer to use /ax/ --> /a:/.

>=20
>     OI. scethach 'emetic' > A. syetha/sietha (same problem as above)
>          -sc>sy/#_
>         -loss of final C
>     why no loss of final V?
Perhaps:

syethach --> syeth=E1 --> syetha?

>     And one additional question : wouldn't this loss of finals cause an=
 awful lot of
> monosyllabic and homonymous words?
Don't know much about Old Irish, but not necessarily.  English lost a
lot of final vowels without creating lots of homophones.  Of course, we
kept most final consonants, so ...

But, if there's a lot of homophones, you can always deal with that by
semantic shift, i.e., another, non-homophonous word, taking over one of
a potentially confusing pair, or just using compounding to deal with
those confusions.  If "eye" and "ear" were homophones, say "seeing eye"
and "hearing ear", or something like that.

--=20
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