YASGT: Adjectival agreement (was: Feminization of plurals?)

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson
> <bpj@...> wrote:
>> On 2009-02-11 Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>> (In speech, you'll find people who have -a
>>> everywhere, ones who have -e everywhere, ones that
>>> make the distinction much as in the written standard
>>> (I do), and ones who draw some other distinction.)
>>>
>> Not in Western and Southern Sweden, where the
>> distinction is still rigorously maintained. We cringe
>> when people from "up country" say things like _den
>> stora mannen_!
>
> Er? Upholding the distinction was one of the
> possibilities I listed.
Sorry, write it down to ¡0 pm fatigue!

I was actually mostly reacting to what you said
just before:

>>> Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this disappears from the
>>> written standard soon enough, but it's still mostly
>>> adhered to in writing.
I can't see that happen for two reasons:

1) About ¡/3 or more of the population uphold
the distinction, and the rest can't agree on
how to drop it (-a or -e).

2) The ability to uphold the distinction in writing
is a strong educatedness shibboleth.

By comparison I recently read in "Språktidningen"
that in a few decades _dom_ as a single form
corresponding to _de_ and _dem_ has actually
receded.  Perhaps partly due to the fact that there
is a noun _dom_ which is pronounced differently,
but mostly due to the fact that this is an
educatedness shibboleth of exactly the same
kind as the adjectival agreement thing.

FWIW when I speak Bohuslänska I have the -e/-a
adjectival agreement distinction for all historical
masculines, not only the animate ones, and I
say _di_ and _dêm_, but as far as I'm concerned
that is a different language.

(In case you wonder about the spelling _dëm_
Bohuslänska has five phonetic front unrounded
front vowels [i e E & a] which I write as
_i e ê ä â_.  I'm unsure about the phonemic
status of [&] vs. /E/ and /a/ -- there is at
least one minimal pair: [g&:n`] _gärn_ 'crazy'
vs. [ga:n`] _gârn_ 'fishing nets'.  It would
seem like here [&:] is a conditioned allophone
of /E/, but there is also [k&:r] _kär_ 'man',
definite form [k&:n`] _kärn_, which corresponds
to [kQ:4]~[kQ:n] /kA:r/~/kA:n/ in Gothenburgish
and [kA:4(@n)] /karen/ _karl(en)_ in local careful
Standard Swedish, which kind of complicates the
assignment of [&] to /E/.  As for the choice of
symbols there is also _a_ /A/ which makes it
necessary to have three symbols based on <a> in
addition to the symbol for /E/, which makes the
assignments above the best choices even though
most words which have _ä_ in Swedish end up
having _ê_.  There is also _ë_ which I use for
historical schwa.  Synchronically "/@/" is an
archiphoneme for completely unstressed
/e E 8 3\/, and even with etymological info it
is sometimes hard to decide which phoneme it
belongs to, so it is convenient to let it
have its own grapheme, not least in the absence
of stress marking.)

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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