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Re: Palatization and Lenition etc

From:Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>
Date:Saturday, October 23, 2004, 0:23
> > Well, yes. It's generally seen as how the thing > began. > > > > The adjective after feminine noun(or, indeed, > anything), came about > > because feminine nouns ended in a vowel. As far > as I know, intervocalic > > consonants were softened in Welsh, largely > ignoring word boundaries. > > So, because most Masculine nouns ended in *'-os', > and most Feminine in > > *'-a', things following feminine nouns softened, > and following masculine > > nouns did not. > > > > > The thing is, lenition doesn't occur when a noun > follows another noun > that ends in a vowel does it? Why doesn't it also > happen in this > situation? Do you have any idea what stopped it > applying to this when > the "softening" effect first started to occur? The > only thing I can > think is that something else
(possibly an article)
> blocked it.
well..the nouns in vowels didn't always end in vowels. They probably had a consonant at the end that dropped off.... Come to think of it, I dont really know many Welsh nouns that end in a vowel. Some, like "lle" meaning "place", come from "llef". Others, like "ci" was originally an "n-stem", meaning that they ended in "n", which was lost. The word is related to "kuon" in Greek. So basically, the answer to your question is that, the vowels at the end of words now do not cause lenition, unless the word is feminine, because lenition ended before these became vowelfinal words. I can't give any examples of Welsh development, but I'll use Nindic, my conlang, which has a strong Welshfeel about it. Nouns in the "Genitive" position in Nindic are lenited. This came about after a long process of lenition-spreading, whereby, the rules for lenition were standardized through analogy. Originally, only words which had ended in vowels caused lenition to a genitive word following it. The examples show the original state of affairs, where only previously vowelfinal nouns cause lenition. Example: buth fucha /buT vuxa/ "spider's web" web spider bucha "spider" (no lenition) buth < *bukta (vowel final) cawa burcho /kawa burxo/ "wizard's dog" dog wizard burcho "wisard" (no lenition) cawa < *kawan (consonant final) So, from this one can gather that lenition occured BEFORE the "n" was lost from <*kawan>, if it had been lost and then lenition occured, <cawa> would have caused lenition. Because lenition later became the rule in this case....the later Nindic language has <cawa furcho>. Which is not the inherited form. I hope this kind of clears things up. Elliott. _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com