Re: Ablaut and Infix Origins

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 01:29:30 -0600, Eric Christopherson
<rakko@...> wrote:

>On Feb 23, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Jeffrey Jones wrote:
>
>> I don't really understand how ablaut and infixing come about. I've been
>> trying to find information online with good explanations without any
>> significant success. I found one paper on the theory of infix origins but it
>> was very Chomskyan. Another summarized the different types but didn't
>> give a me "feel" for it. There seems to be even less satisfactory information
>> on ablaut origins. Apparently all the existing ablaut systems came about
>> thousands of years ago. Any ideas?
>>
>> Jeff
>
>Funny you'd mention that -- I finally got around to reading some of
>_A natural history of infixation_, by Alan C. L. Yu (Amazon: <http://
>www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Infixation-Theoretical-Linguistics/dp/
>019927939X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203837054&amp;sr=8-1>). It
>talks about four origins: metathesis; entrapment; reduplication
>mutation; and morphological excrescence and prosodic stem association.
Someone was kind enough to send me the whole text in a private email.
Unfortunately it was pretty much incomprehensible, except for chapter 5; I
suppose that's the relevent part.

>For ablaut, you might follow Guy Deutscher's hypothetical model of
>some features of Semitic morphology in his _The unfolding of
>language_ (Amazon: <http://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Guy-
>Deutscher/dp/0099460254/ref=sr_1_1?
>ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203837261&sr=1-1>). His scenario depends on
>sound changes in vowels caused by adjacent consonants (such as
>pharyngeals), which then spread by analogy.
I've heard of that book, but I don't have a book budget.

>Finally, I know of a short paper by Adrian Macelaru called
>"Compensatory Metathesis as a Source of Nonconcatenative Morphology:
>Semitic Evidence". There used to be a Google-cached copy of it
>somewhere on the web, but unfortunately I can't find it now. As the
>title suggests, it implicates metathesis, but in this case it's
>compensatory -- where, e.g., the loss of a final vowel happens at the
>same time that some echo of that vowel occurs inside the word. Maybe
>if we can find him we can ask him for a copy; he seemed very nice,
>but busy.
I couldn't find it either.

>Infixes, ablaut, and nonconcatenative morphology are some of my
>favorite morphological things.
On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:42:12 -0600, Eric Christopherson
<rakko@...> wrote:

>On Feb 24, 2008, at 1:29 AM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>
>Here's something else I just read, from Andrew Sihler's _New
>comparative grammar of Greek and Latin_ (Amazon: <http://
>www.amazon.com/New-Comparative-Grammar-Greek-Latin/dp/0195083458/
>ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203841422&sr=8-1>; Relevant section
>from Google Books: <http://books.google.com/books?
>id=IeHmqKY2BqoC&printsec=frontcover&sig=0SXOYO1u9_WAGMKcWJ4Xu5Kge
QY#PPA109,M1>):
>
><quote>
>Vowel alternations result from commonplace kinds of sound change.
>English has vowel alternations which arose at various times from
>various causes. Thus the alternations seen in NE [=New, or Modern,
>English] _drink, drank, drunk; meet, met; blood, bleed; wise, wisdom;
>revise, revision; efficient, effective_ represent six unrelated
>patterns, that is, they arose via six different historical
>developments. In addition, accidents (such as borrowing or chance
>resemblance) on occasion create an appearance of alternation: _cat,
>kitten; ill, ailing; choose, choice; bed, boudoir; strap, strop;
>whole, hale_.
></quote>
I suppose so. The question is, how can a _system_ of alternations involving
the whole language, such as in PIE or Semitic, arise? Each of the English
pattern examples applies to a small set of words and the accidental
alternations are each one of a kind AFAICT. (I'm having trouble saying what I
want to say, so I'll leave it at that)

>I find it very interesting to learn that the alternations listed all
>come from separate patterns, and am especially impressed with his
>list of chance resemblances (which I had already read could lead to
>novel alternations in the minds of speakers, but had never seen a
>list of such words in English).
>
>AFMCL, I made up a list of root words with definitions once, and it
>turned out that three of the roots for body parts ended in /?/, quite
>by accident! -- a situation which could certainly cause speakers to
>infer that /?/ is a body part suffix. If I had instead coined words
>with /?/ inside, my speakers might instead have intuited that /?/ to
>be an infix.
I suppose they might, although three words doesn't sound like much of a basis
for generalization (and I personally find infixes completely unintuitive).

Thanks for the detailed response(s).

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