Re: partial letter replacement in languages?

On Saturday, December 11, 2004, at 09:16 , Rodlox wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 12:18 AM
> Subject: Re: partial letter replacement in languages?
>
>
>> On Friday, December 10, 2004, at 05:05 , Rodlox wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>>
>>>  what I meant was, such as ->
>>>
>>> /Murad/ becomes /Murat/ *
>>> ..yet...
>>> /Abdulhamid/ does not become /Abtulhamid/
>
>> The Murad who was a student of mine last year never became a Murat at any
>> time  :)
>
>   my apologies, then.
>
>  I've been reading history books published in various countries, and I had
> noticed the d->t shift (such as Murad/Murat) in, at least, the Turkish
> Republic.
Right - you are referring to two quite different phenomena in you email of
10th Dec. Let's start with _Murad_.

I am sure the _Murad_ I taught would write his names as _Murat_ if he was
writing in Turkish and his name was in the nominative case. But in English
he always called himself _Murad_.

What we have in modern Turkish is precisely the same phenomenon that we
have in modern German, Russian and Breton quite a few other languages.
*The phonemic distinction between voiced & voiceless obstruents is lost in
word final position: they are _all_ devoiced.* (Some language voiced them
all)

(Obstruent = any sound involving a constriction (whether full or partial)
in the airflow, i.e. plosives, fricatives and affricates)

Thus, if we take a German example, both _Rat_ "counsel" and _Rad_ "wheel"
are pronounced the same [RA:t]. But when a grammatical ending, for example
the genitive, is added, the two stems are pronounced differently: Rates
['RA:t@s] ~ Rades [RA:d@s]. This happens also in Russian and some other
languages. Many languages, like German and Russian, do not reflect this in
the spelling, preferring to spell the morpheme the same way.

Turkish, however, does show this in spelling. Thus, in Turkish, the name
{Murad} is written thus before the dative case ending -a (_Murada_) but
the nominative is pronounced and _Murat_.

>
>  I did not mean to imply that it was true for all Turkic or Arabic
> languages...
The two groups of languages are vey different and related. Turkish has
borrowed some words from Arabic as a result of the Turks' adopting Islam,
but the language is unrelated. AFAIK this devoicing of final obstruents
does not occur in any variety of Arabic. How widespread it is among other
Turkic languages, I do not know.

[snip]
>
>> In any case I would hardly expect /bd/ (two voiced plosive) to change to
>> /bt/ (but I would expect /bt/ to be assimilated to /bd/).
>
>  ah.
>
>  if I might ask, what is /bt/ that is could be assimilated, whereas
> /bd/ (a
> voiced plosive) could not?  *curious*
Because one plosive is voiced and the other voiceless. English seems to
tolerate this, for example, _obtain_ is not pronounced either ads *optain
nor as *obdain. In fact in English the /t/ remains voiceless and there is
mild assimilation: the /b/ does suffer some devoicing, but not sufficient
to become [p].

But in many languages if two obstruents (not just plosives) are
continguous they must either both be voiced or voiceless - not a mix. This
process is called _assimilation_.

Assimilation may be progressive as in English where -s is pronounced [s]
of voiceless sounds as in _cats_ /k&ts/ but as [z] after voiced sounds as
in _dogs_ /dogz/.. Or it may regressive as in Latin where both /k/+/s/ -->
/ks/ and /g/+/s/ --> /ks/, for example: pax /pa:ks/ (gen. pacis
/pa:kis/) ~ rex /re:ks/ (gen. regis /re:gis/). Thus in very many languages
  if in a compound /b/ would come next to /t/ it would either change tp /pt/
  (the most common change, I believe) or to /bd/.

Full assimilation occurs when one sound becomes the same as the next one.
This is common in Italian, cf. notte "night" <-- nocte(m) /nokte/ which
shows full regressive assimilation.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]