Re: Distribution of Front Rounded Vowels

Ben wrote:

<<The first line of the Babel text in the parent lang is:

?ix&S mi4up hQk fQk wifiw kiNewSiw jyp wifuj nafoSSiw

In the daughter it is:

jiSES my4p hOk fOk vivy tSyJ9Zy yp vyvy novoSy.

And now my question: what is the normal distribution of front rounded
vowels? Something tells me the overabundance of them in the daughter lang is
unnatural.>>

Actually, thinking about French, it isn't too bad.

Related to French, are there any French historians out there?   Because if
all
*u's became [y], and sequences of *ou became [u], it would seem to me that
[y] would be more common in the present language than [u].   Is this the
case?   The French letter frequencies found here...

http://www.cryptogram.org/cdb/words/frequency.txt

...aren't good enough because they deal with letters, not sounds.   Anyway,
this is something that's been on my mind, and the answer should relate
directly to Ben's original query.   It would seem to me that the answer would
be that [y] is more common than [u].   In order for the opposite to be true,
the language would've had to've conspired to delete consonants all over the
place so that /o/ and /u/ appeared next to each other.   To an extent that
happened, if I'm thinking about it right (*totus > tous [tu], etc.), but that
can't
have happened enough for [u] to supplant [y], could it have?

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Replies