Re: Apophony?

Matt Pearson wrote:

> Steg:
> >>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.
>
> Ray:
> >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...
Are you all kidding?!
>From my "Encyklopedia je;zykoznawstwa ogo'lnego" (Encyclopaedia of general
linguistics):

"APOPHONY. An alternation of vowels. A term known from the comparative
grammar of Indo-European languages, but it is used with reference to other
languages, too, e.g. cf. a work by J. Kuryl/owicz <<L'Apophonie en se'mitique>>,
1962."

and

"INDO-EUROPEAN APOPHONY. A complex of proto-indo-european morphonological
vowels alternations, of which [alternations] reflection is a change of vowels,
occurring in individual Indo-European languages, like Greek _pateer_ 'father'
- gen. sing._patros_ - nom. pl. _pateres_ - _eupatoos_ 'coming from a noble
family' - nom.pl. _eupatores_[...]; Latin [...] _venio_ 'I arrive' - _veeni_
'I have arrived', _aagoo_ 'I do' - _eegi_ 'I did'; Hittite _kuenzi_ 'he wins'
- _kunanzi_ 'they win' [...]. I. A. included 2 types of vowels alternations:
a) alternations [...] qualitative: e : o and (more rarely) ee : oo;
b) alternations [...] quantitative: a lengthening e : ee, o : oo (i : ii,
u : uu) and a reduction e : 0, o : 0, ee : @, oo : @, aa : @. Depending on
a type of a vowel alternant appearing in a morpheme, we distinguish 3 degrees
of vocalism: full, lengthened [?], zero (reduced)."

>From "Je;zyki indoeuropejskie" (Indoeuropean languages):
"Theoretical possibilities of Indo-European apophonic alternations we can
present in following schema:
degrees                                 apophonic series
reduced                                 0  i   u   r-  l-  m-  n-
reduced lengthened         ii  uu  rr- ll- mm- nn-
full _e_        (base)          e  ei  eu  er  el  em  en
full _o_                                        o  oi  ou  or  ol  om  on
lengthened _e_                  ee eei eeu eer eel eem een
lengthened _o_                  oo ooi oou oor ool oom oon
Outside that schema was an alternation: _aa, ee, oo / @_, where _@_
represented a degree reduced from lengthened one [...]."

double vowel = long vowel
C- = syllabic consonant
@ = schwa

--
P. M. ARKTAYG