Ray Brown scripsit:
> On Sunday, January 9, 2005, at 09:18 , Isaac Penzev wrote:
>
> > I think borrowing vowel harmony is highly improbable.
>
> Why? It certainly happened in Greek dialects (probably now all extinct -
> but surviving till early 20th cent.) spoken in Anatolia.
Oho! I didn't know this. All I knew that in most lgs spoken in ex-USSR, v.h.
seems to be a dying phonetic law and doesn't show up in recent borrowings.
Nor I ever heard about dialects in contact with Turkic, Mongolian or
Mordovian lgs to import v.h.
> I understand Geoff's Franco-Turkic language will be situated in an area
> where Turkish is still spoken. The actual Greek examples show that it is
> very likely vowel harmony would have been borrowed.
So, as we see, it may happen. If the lg structure permits. But mostly I
would agree with Bob Thornton who wrote:
<<Most languages that have vowel harmony tend to lose it when exposed to
languages that do not.>>
> The silencing of final consonants, which became typical of later French,
> would not then have happened.
Agreed.
> That would have had profound influence on
> the use of articles. Indeed, we find a significant reduction in the use of
> the definite article in the Greek dialects, with the article being
> confined in many cases simply to definite direct objects.
Agreed.
> There would
> certainly have been no impetus to develop the partitive article of modern
> French.
Agreed.
> We also find some influence in syntax - genitive constructions on the
> Turkish model.
If you mean idafas, yes. It may be something like *père son champ "father's
field".
Interesting. I thought about exactly the same developments you mentioned.
As for case distinctions Doug Dee mentioned in the msg about his Frankish
project:
> 1. It retains the neat case system of OF, which had a lot on nouns that
> declined like ths:
>
> Nom. sg. = li voisins
> Obl. sg. = le voisin
> Nom. pl. = li voisin
> Obl. pl. = les voisins,
, I strongly doubt it could remain intact.
> I think your
> suggestion of "basically Old French with substantial Turkic influences" is
> more likely.
Surely! See the example of Farsi: it remained essentially Persian, though up
to 50% of its wocabulary is borrowed from Arabic.
Truly yours,
-- Yitzik