[WAAAY OT] RE: VAXen [was RE: Do not call them PCMCIA Cards...]

[Liam Proven]

2009/7/20 Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com>:
> 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, Gänser; 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,
> Männer).
>
> 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/

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for that!


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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