20 Jul
2009
20 Jul
'09
12:01 p.m.
For those not interested in linguistics, this will be boring. YHBW.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2009 4:13 AM
2009/7/17 Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com>:
> I just took at look at the Wrongipedia page to see
whether the confusion
> was Liam's or theirs. It's theirs.
I would feebly say in my defence that I though it was
odd that the
strong/weak usage here did not match that for verbs, where of course
strong verbs are those that do not follow the standard pattern for
conjugation - but I had a reference, so I let it be. Serves me right.
Have you fixed the article?
I have corrected a number of Indo-European related articles in the past. My
corrections get removed by some twit. I don't bother any longer--life is too
short.
>> One of the irregular plurals is -en: ox/oxen,
child/children, man/men,
>> brother/brethren.
> man/men is umlaut, like goose/geese.
Umlaut? Do you mean ablaut?
No. These are two different processes/phenomena.
Most people are familiar with the term "umlaut" as the name for the two little
dots over a, o, and u in German, but it more properly refers to a phonological
process in which a sound in a following syllable affects a sound preceding it.
The most common form of umlaut in the Germanic languages is called i-umlaut; in
some of the Germanic languages u-umlaut is present (an _a_ becomes _o_ in a
syllable preceding a syllable with a _u_, for example). Umlaut is automatic
until the syllable with the *i or *j (= _y_--the symbols were created by German
linguists in the 19th Century) is lost.
PGmc. *gans, pl. *gansiz = *gensiz by i-umlaut. In German, we get Gans, G?nser; in
English (and Frisian, but that's not important now), the *n is lost with
lengthening of the preceding vowel, and we end up with Anglo-Saxon go:s, ge:s >
Modern English goose, geese.[1]
PGmc. *manu, pl. *manijaz = *menijaz > English man, men (and German Mann,
M?nner).
Ablaut, on the other hand, is already in place in the oldest Indo-European
languages, and the conditioning factor(s) for it have been argued about for
more than 200 years. There are two (at least) kinds of ablaut, called
qualitative and quantitative. In the former, some forms of a stem will show an
*e while others will show an *o; in the latter, *e/o (as the ablaut vowel is
often written) will drop out (zero grade) or lengthen (lengthened grade) or may
show up in normal grade. Proto-Indo-European *e > Proto-Germanic *i and *o >
*a, so sing/sang is an example of qualitative ablaut; PIE *CnC > PGmc. *CunC,
so PIE *snghw- > PGmc. *sung- > sung (as well as a nominal form *sunga: which
by a-umlaut gives us "song").
[1] I can't write a macron ("long mark") over the vowels, so I'm using a
modern
convention in which colon marks length.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
(206) 342-2239
(206) 465-2916 cell
http://www.pdpplanet.org/