Re: Apophony?
| From: | Matt Pearson <mpearson@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, April 27, 1999, 20:02 |
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Ray Brown wrote:
>>Just wondering....what is "apophony"? I was glancing at a book on the
>>history of Hebrew today (a different one than before) and it said that
>>the Semitic "broken plurals" are considered by some to have something to
>>do with apophony. But it didn't explain what apophony is, and none of
>>the dictionaries i looked at had it.
>So come on - one of you professional linguists must surely know the answer.
>Can't you help us amateurs ;)
Well, I'm (nominally) a professional linguist, and I've never heard the
term before. Looks like a strange portmanteau of "apocope" (deletion of
the final vowel of a stem) and "allophony" (phonetic variation in the
pronunciation of a phoneme). But given the context, apocope and
allophony both miss the mark. Must be some term peculiar to Semitic
linguistics...
Matt.
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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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