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

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:43:36 -0400, Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> wrote:

>But there's an interesting thing with /u/: it seems that it tends to get
>fronted more often than /o/. Also, it seems to me that it allows more
>different variants of transformation (unrounding etc.) while /o/ mainly
>gets more open / more closed. (I'm making abstraction of diphthongization
>and other things that tend to be conditioned by quantity).
You do have a point; taking a look through the langs with /y/ that I'm
familiar with:

* 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...

But regarding the /o/; well, as Romance /u/ was getting fronted in French,
the stressed /o/ was also getting fronted... (while the unstressed one
became /u/ and pushed the old /u/ onto the front axis) I don't know if I'll
agree with high front-roundeds being more common than low ones; in
Icelandic, for example, we lost the /y/ but retained the open-mid /9/, {ö},
and added a close-mid /2/, {u}.

>Why, I wonder? Cf. the u's of most European langs: they are so often
>a bit fronted compared to o's, and historic/orthographic u's have so
>many different reflexes/readings (cf. English, French, Welsh, Icelandic,
>Swedish/Norwegian, Greek...).
Greek, there's one in your favor; fronted the /u/ but not the /o/. I should
mention Scandinavian langs (especially Danish) for the fact that many
original /y/ have lowered to /2/ (cf. Danish {kön} from Old Norse {kyn}).
As to Icelandic, the /O/ became fronted just as the /y/ - the u-umlaut of
a, {o-tail}, which was [O], merged with an original /2/, {o-slash}; their
modern value is /9/, {ö}.

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.


>OTOH 'spontaneous' fronting of /o/ seems rather counter-intuitive to me.
>In a natlang I'd suppose some intermediary diphthong.
>
>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?

Óskar

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