Re: Chain shifts & transformed u's, was: Blandness

Oskar Gudlaugsson (in reply to Basilius' equally perceptive post) wrote:
>* French has /y/ < /u/
>* Dutch has /y/ < /u/ (right?)
>* Most Germanic languages have some /y/ < /u/ through umlaut
>* Nordic langs (ON descendants) have a few /y/ < /i/ through u-umlaut
>(rounding)
>* Cantonese has [y] only in certain environments, and where another Chinese
>lang, Mandarin, generally has /u/; without checking, I'd guess Canto [y] to
>be either a synchronic allophone of /u/, or a phonemic /y/ from an
>earlier /u/. Meanwhile, Mandarin also has [y], seemingly also in restricted
>environments; I'd suspect that one also to be allophonic... the Sinologists
>will rectify these speculations :p
>* Altaics have [y] as a front-harmonized realization of /u/
>* Attic Greek had /y/ < /u/
>
>Interestingly enough, those are all the y's I actually know of; I can
>account, roughly, for the origin of all of them (while obviously not for
>the various less marked "starting vowels" of those langs). Front roundeds
>are unquestionably marked (though I still reject their being "extremely"
>rare), and thus unstable, with a short lifetime. But then, all vowels have
>a short lifetime...
A useful list.  As I began thinking about this, it struck me as _very
likely_ that front round V could be ascribed to umlauting in almost all
cases. Though  French /y/ seems to be an exception, often blamed on Celtic
substrate and/or Germanic influence (not really answers).  So might Dutch
/y/, unless it descends from Germanic short *u (long *u diphthongizes >
{ui}, [øj] IIRC. As for the Chinese, according to Benedict's _Sino-Tibetan_,
the proto language had only /a e i o u/ ,
so there it seems likely that influence of surrounding vowels could be the
cause.
>
(snips>
>Perhaps what's interesting here is that in all those Western langs, we have
>plenty of back vowels being fronted (while retaining their rounding, at
>least for a while), but few front vowels being backed (though perhaps some
>being centralized). Or do we? In any case, perhaps we can agree that back-
>unroundeds, at least the high ones, are less common than front-roundeds.>
I'll agree with that.  BTW, if it was my comments that brought about the
"rarity" debate, I probably should have said fr.ro V are _relatively_ rare--
at least in Western languages, and also in the sense that generally, in
those langs. that do have them, not every back vowel has a fr.ro.
counterpart (thought IIRC there is a German, perhaps Swiss, dialect where
that is true).

The origin of back unrounded V is harder.  I don't buy the "pointing taboo"
mentioned for Japanese; sounds post hoc ergo propter hoc to me.  Though it
is true that many Asian cultures do have such taboos (Indonesian~Javanese
for one).

A thought:  Germanic ("familiar") umlaut modifies the _stem_ vowel to
harmonize more with the suffix vowel.  Whereas perhaps Very Early Turkish
(Altaic?) modifed the _suffix_ vowel to harmonize more with the stem vowel.
>
>>OTOH 'spontaneous' fronting of /o/ seems rather counter-intuitive to me.
>>In a natlang I'd suppose some intermediary diphthong.
Likely; consider Dutch {ui}-- halfway to becoming /y/??
>>
>>What do you think?
>
>Don't fully agree with that; how about French /'o/ > /2/, for instance?
>(cf. "pouvoir", "je peux") Was there an intermediary diphthong?>
Dim memories of French development:  many/most? *o > /2/ arise from loss or
laxing  of an intervening consonant, often /d/ < *d or *t, resulting in a
fr/ba or ba/fr sequence.  *nidu- > noeud, probably **poto > **podo (cf.
Span. puedo) > peux-- perhaps here the 1st person form by analogy from the
rest of the paradigm, *podes, podet. ( OOC, where did the -v- in the
infinitive come from??? Somehow another analogical form, I suspect.)