Re: Too Many Too Little Possible Roots!!!

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:

> > Well... ever wondered why English roots are predominantly
> > monosyllabic? I'd reckon that its because of the extrememly complex
> > syllable structure.
>
> I'd say it's the other way around.  English lost sounds (especially
> schwas), creating a more complex syllable-structure.  For instance, the
> past tense marker was once always /@d/, thus one would say /hElp@d/, but
> later that schwa was lost, creating /hElpt/, when two-stop codas became
> permissible (actually, for a while both /@d/ and //d// were used, hence
> variations like helped/help'd)
Malagasy, an Austronesian language with African step-parents, is an
interesting example of the kinds of pendulum swings you're talking about.
Proto-Malagasy, like Malay and the Philippine languages, allowed word-final
consonants and word-medial clusters (CVC syllables, in other words).  But
then, probably under the influence of the Eastern Bantu languages, it
developed word-final and word-medial epenthetic vowels, leading to
exclusively CV syllables.  Compare the Tagalog word for moon, /buwan/,
with its Malagasy cognate /vulana/.  The ancestor of these words was
probably something like /bulan/, CV-CVC, but in Malagasy an /a/ was
added after the final nasal to give CV-CV-CV.  So here we have
simplification of syllable structure leading to longer roots.

In contemporary Malagasy, however, certain unstressed vowels are
normally devoiced in rapid speech, and in some environments almost
completely disappear.  Thus for instance the word "olona" /uluna/,
which is stressed on the first syllable, is normally pronounced more
like /uln@/ or even /uln/.  If radical devoicing persists in the
language, these unstressed vowels might eventually disappear altogether,
leading to shorter roots but more complex syllables (CVC, CVCC, etc.).

Matt.