Re: Costanice Phonology Sketch

On Friday, April 15, 2005, at 04:43 , JS Bangs wrote:

> As some people had requested, here's a sketch of the phonology of
> Costanice. I have grammar sketches underway and an outline of the
> sound changes, but those will have to wait until later.
>
> VERY SHORT HISTORY
>
> The various regional dialects of Koine Greek begin to break up early
> into Hellenic and Byzantine groups.
Date? What are these 'Hellenic' but non-Byzantine groups? I thought the
point about Koine was that it the _common_ international (i.e.
non-regional) form, after all it is short for _he koine dialektos_ "the
common dialect" which, under the Roman Empire, completely eclipsed all the
earlier dialects (tho some Doric peculiarities appear to have survived in
Lakonia in southern Greece and in southern Italy).

My understanding is that Byzantine Greek was a developnment from the
Hellenistic Koine.

> When the Turks sacked
> Constantinople in 1452, several hundred refugees speaking Byzantine
> dialects were offered shelter by the Aragonese king,
So Constanice developed from 15th century Byzantine Greek? I had assumed
from some of the archaic features, e.g. the survival of the preposition
_en_ (for which Byzantine Greek had _es_) and declinable present active
participles, which had disappeared early in on Medieval Greek, that
Constanice has developed from a Greek speaking community cut off from the
rest of the Greek speaking world early in the Roman Empire.

If it developed from 15th century Byzantine Greek, how did these archaic
features come to be re-introduced into spoken Greek after being absent for
so many centuries? Or was Byzantine Greek different in IB than it was in
the Byzantine Empire *here*?

> and set up a
> community in Barcelona. From this point on the language was heavily
> influence by Spanish.
But isn't this a _Catalonian_ speaking area?

>  About 150 years later their descendants began to
> emmigrate to South America where, after some oppression and a few
> failed revolutions, they eventually got their own state speaking their
> offshoot of Greek, now called Costanice ( < konstantinike:).
>
> PRONUNCIATION, THE SHORT VERSION
>
> Pronounce everything as in Castillian Spanish, except that |c| is [tS]
> before a front vowel, not [T]. [T] is always spelled |z|. Stress is
> always penultimate unless marked with an accent.
>
> (Actually, there's some difference with the vowels--see below.)
>
> CONSONANTS
>  p  t  k
>  b  d  g
>  f  T  x
>  v
>  m  n
>    l  r
>
> Pronunciation is basically as in Spanish. Voiced stops are spirantized
> between vowels, /r/ is a trill, etc. /v/ is marginal--it only occurs
> intervocalically, and for most speakers is [B], i.e. identical to
> intervocalic /b/.
How do the /b/, /d/, /g/ series fit in? What is their origin? From the
example of _zruebo_ below it, it suggests they developed from the voicing
earlier /p/, /t/ and /k/ in certain environments. I notice /v/ is there,
but what has happened to Byzantine /D/ and /G/ (from ancient delta & gamma)
? And what has happened to /z/ which has been part of the Greek phonemic
inventory for more two thousand years?

>
> /k/ and /g/ before front vowels become [tS] and [x] respectively.
I understand the palatalization of /k/ before front vowels; it occurs in
some modern dialects *here*. But why does /g/ apparently become a
fricative instead of being palatalized? What happens *here* in those
dialects that do palatalize is AFAIK:
/k/ --> [tS]
/x/ --> [S]
/G/ --> [j]
(The last is common to all dialects)

> Unlike in Spanish, this actually creates alternations within a
> paradigm: /igo/ > [iGo], /ige/ > [ixe]. (That's "house" in the
> nominative and dative, respectively.)
So, Constanice has revived the ancient _oikos_ for "house" which *here*
had disappeared from Byzantine Greek, having been replaced by Latin
borrowing _(h)ospition_ (modern greek _spiti_).

[snip]
> VOWELS
>
> The only vowel phones are [i u e o a]. However, there are three
> morphophonemic alternations involving [e] and two involving [o]. Each
> of these morphophonemes has three allophones: one when in pre-tonic
> syllables, one when in tonic (stressed) syllables, and one when in
> post-tonic syllables. The alternations are:
>
>      PRE  TONIC  POST
> /e/   i     e     e
> /e:/  e    ie     e
> /ei/  e     i     e
> /o/   u     o     o
> /o:/  o    ue     o
>
> The symbols given in slashes represent the etymologies of each
> alternation, although synchronically that's completely arbitrary.
Sorry - I'm puzzled. Are you saying that in IB the ancient distinction
between long and short vowels , which had disappeared *here* at least by
the 4th cent CE, actually remained in Byzantine Greek till the 15th
century? *Here* also |ei| had become a _monophthong_ before the 5th cen
BCE, being, as far as we can tell, simple [e:] in Classical (Attic) Greek
(where eta was [E:]) before giving way sometime between the 4th & 3rd
cents BCE to [i:].

[snip]
> The most usual epenthetic consonant is _n_. For example:
>  to zruebo   the person
_zreubo_ is presumbly from Byzantine (and modern) /'anTropos/ - but why
the shift in stress from the initial syllable? The diphthongization of
stressed _Vulgar Latin_ /O/ had happened quite a few centuries before the
15th. It would seem from the above that in IB the word was pronounced
/'anTro:pos/ in Byzantium? Was the change of stress something that
happened after the Costanice speakers arrived in the Iberian peninsular?

I'm genuinely puzzled.

>  ton igo     the house
>
> But some words add a different, lexically determined consonant, such
> as _huesga(r)_ which adds an /r/:
Why /r/?

>  Huesga sí    because you (sg)...
>  Huesgar imas because you (pl)...
Ah, so _imas_ (<-- ymas) survived in IB. *Here* it had become homophonous
with _imas_ "us" and been replaced by (e)sas well before the 15th cent.

> Other forms drop the vowel. The 2pl verbal conjugation is among these:
>  poyide tudo   you (pl) do this
>  poyíd arte?   you (pl) do what?
> Note that the stress remains on the same syllable, so an accent mark
> has to be written in the forms lacking final /e/.
I see the ancient _touto_ has survived - but what is origin of _arte_?

> Most interesting, though, is that some words alternate completely
> based on liason. Most propositions and the present conjugation of _to
> be_ are this way. Thus "from" is either _ap_ or _po_ depending on
> whether or not the following word begins with a vowel:
>  po tudos  from this one
>  ap otos   from him
>  sti tudo  It is this one.
>  est oto   It is he.
Are we assume that, unlike *here*, the old diphthong /aw/ survived in IB
Byzantine Greek? We do not know exactly when the shift from /aw/ to /av/ ~
/af/ took place *here*, but it was probably establish by early Medieval
period. Certainly *here* it was very well established by the 15th century
(indeed, probably for about 100 years). Is the change from /aw/ to /o/
something that took place in the post-exile development of Costanice, or
had it already taken place in Byzantine Greek in IB?

And ancient _esti_ has survived in IB; *here* it had been replaced by
_eni_ early in the Middle Ages (and that has now, through analogy with
other forms, become _ine_ in modern Greek).

This is both interesting and puzzling. It is obvious that Byzantine (and
earlier?) Greek had already developed differently in IB than it had *here*
  long before the Turks (both in IB and *here*) caused the 'proto-Costanice'
  to flee to the protection of the King of Aragon.

I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Constanice is basically
sound changes that happened to Vulgar Latin in Castilian Spanish to
ancient (not Byzantine) Greek pronounced (largely) in the Erasmian manner
(which would IMO give a very attractive result).

Now, obviously what you do with your own conlang and its associated
con-history is up to you (tho presumably if Costanice is one of the
languages of IB, the con-history should not contradict IB con-history),
but - and I am making this suggestion as a *friendly* suggestion -

There were Greek colonies in Spain at a very early date - certainly by the
6th cent BCE and possibly even earlier. Why not have Greeks moving from
the coast and setting up an enclave somewhere in the interior of the
Iberian peninsular (maybe, to flee from the growing power of the
Carthaginians) who would then have become isolated from developments over
in the Aegean area? This would account for a more conservative form of
Greek, preserving ancient forms which disappeared elsewhere. It would also
allow the changes similar to those that affected Vulgar Latin to affect
the development of Greek as spoken by these people.

Just a suggestion.

However - one point I feel I must mention. The form _zruebo_ seems to
derive fom the ghastly Henninian stress accentuation of ancient Greek (a
system *never* used by Greeks, either ancient or modern). It is due to a
17th cent Dutch doctor of medicine, Heinrich Christian Henning (who
Latinized himself as 'Henninius'), who put forward the remarkable theory
that the accents printed on Greek texts had nothing to do with ancient
pronunciation and that ancient Greek was pronounced with the same stress
rules as Classical Latin. For some reason, his ideas got adopted in the
Netherlands and in the UK and its erstwhile Empire. It was even for a time
used in the US until, early in the 19th century, German influence caused
the Americans to adopt saner ideas    :)

We know that in fact the written accents do indicate the _pitch_ accent of
the ancients (the details of which we do not know in full) and *here* they
gave way to stress in the late Hellenic period. The rest of the world,
which wisely IMHO took no notice of Henninius, also stresses Greek this
way even where the Erasmian pronunciation is used.

I know that in conlangs and conhistories _anything_ is possible - but
Henninian stress - ach y fi!!!!

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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