Re: Feasible, or not?: Metasthesis In Silindion

Elliott Lash wrote:


>In Silindion the phenomenon of metasthesis is particularly common.....There
are many places where it occurs, however, I'm only concentrating on when a
proto cluster *CN (where N is a nasal,usually /n/) becomes
>NC in Silindion. Other environments such as *VC > CV have not yet been
studying in detail.
>
>The metasthesis of *CN to NC occurs most often in verbal roots when the
suffixes *-nad (GERUND) and *-nV (PASSIVE) are added.
>There are a few other verbal suffixes as well. In nominal roots, it occurs
in some accusatives of some noun classes.
>
>The process by which this occured is as follows:
>
>Using first _idnad_
>(here N indicates prenasalization)
>(snips)
>/idnad/ > /idnat/ > /iNdnat_h/ > /iNdnaT/ > /iNdnah/ > /indna/ > /inda/
>
Yes, a case of anticipatory nasalization with subsequent deletion of the
causing nasal... very neat.

I once proposed similar rules for metatheses in certain E.Indonesian
languages (forms like mu-dava > mdwava 'you-sg. open' ki-dava > kdyava 'we
open'; it also operated in compounding pipi-duma > pipdyuma 'sheep' i.e it
involved the final (unstressed) i/u of the first member and a following
consonant.

mi-dáva > mi-d(y)áva > m0-dyáva, mdyava

au 'fire' - bare 'ember' > au bware 'charcoal' ( and bware is also
possible).. Thus an isolated form like /bwaye/ 'spleen' must result from
some old compound /.....u-baye/ where the first member has been lost.

These two types are quite likely due to incorporation of fast-speech rules
into the morpheme structure rules.  (At least one investigator discovered
that if he asked his informants to slow down, they restored the underlying
structure)

Another set of languages in the same group had forms like /últi/ ~/úlit-/
'skin' (< MP *kulit), which looks like metathesis but is much more simply
explained as due to rules of epenthesis, and syncope of unstressed V:
*kulit > **?úlit > **úliti > ulti
All possible *-VC combinations do this.  In this case, it appears to have
resulted from a strategy to preserve original final C, in an area where
their loss is far more common (and yet still have an underlying CVCVC
structure)

>------------
>Two interesting cases of Metasthesis occur in the words:
>
>*akda   : in front of, before
>*sikndo : cat
>
>in *akda, *kd becomes first *kn then the regular series of changes aply
producing _anka_
>In *sikndo, the /n/ between consonants is lost, producing *kd, which then
becomes *kn, which then becomes _sinko_
>
A question:  apparently your morpheme structure allows /...CC.../  at least
in certain cases, like the above.  Was /...CN.../ permitted at one time, or
does that particular metathesis (as in the first batch of exs.) only take
place across a morpheme boundary?

These last exs. are somewhat reminiscent of the Kash no-longer productive
/..C-ni/ > /...NCi/ as in ñupit 'accustomed', ñupindi 'usually'; livek
'long', livengi 'along (prep.)'.  Kash does have regular metathesis of
/C-r/.

>So....what do you think ?
Ah loves metathesis.......