Andreas Johansson wrote:
> That naturally made me think
> of the marginal presence of short [e] in Swedish,
Not in all lects.
> which in turn brought to mind
> the loss of the /r/ in words like __erkänna_ in rapid speech. From loss of
> consonants to my late grandfather's 'lect the step was pretty much inevitable.
>
> And then I realized something nifty about that 'lect I do not believe I've ever
> reflected over before, namely that, for certain nouns, the definite form is
> simply the most basic form of the stem, while the indefinite is marked by a
> preceeding article. Eg [e: o:] "a river" vs [o:] "the river". In standard, this
> would be [En o:] vs [o:n], with explicit markers for both, but this 'lect
> doesn't like final nasals.
My Bohuslänska register, and to a lesser extent my Gothenburgish
register have definite = indefinite for all non-neuter nouns ending
in -a.
>
> Now, while it's not hard to see how this state of affairs came about - phonetic
> change simply ate the definite marker alive, but only snatched a leg from the
> indefinite one - but nonetheless seems remarkable; normally, we'd expect the
> indefinite to be the less marked form, wouldn't we? Is there any other
> languages which do the same?
As we say: ANADEW -- perhaps also AONADEW: AnOther Natlang Alraedy Did
it Even Worse?
>
> Andreas
>
>
--
/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)