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theiling@hidden.email skrev:
Hi! Peter wrote:
Finally, yes, of course I read it! I told you it was lovely. Those I-umlauts are a bitch though, huh? Certainly causing me a headache here, further south.I-umlauts, u-umlauts, a-umlauts. Of course, the i-umlaut is short for i-umlaut, j-umlaut, R-umlaut and combinatorial palatal umlaut and u-umlaut is short for u-umlaut and w-umlaut. And they happen early and/or late and/or in between, etc. Headache? Yes.
Why? I just love it. Complicated, yes, but the processes themselves are phonetically quite simple: a-umlaut lowers high vowels, since [a] is extremely low, i-umlaut fronts back vowels since [i] is extremely front (actually it also causes *e > *i, but that may be earlier still), and u-umlaut rounds unrounded vowels since [u] is extremely rounded(*). It is another matter that the umlauts, in combination with loss of the ever more unstressed final vowels, wreak havoc with the inflectional system, but actually the umlauts help to preserve distinctions that would otherwise be lost, so they may actually save you some headache -- unless you feel you could live without those distinctions, which I'll not argue with! :) It is also true that it is hard to reverse-derive words since many of the umlauted vowels merge with each other or with pre-existing non-umlauted vowels (e.g. is a given _i_ from *i or *e, a given _e_ from *e or *a or a given _y_ from *i or from *u? An _ￜ_ may even be from *a through combined i- and w-umlaut! It usually helps to know the grammatical function/class of a word in unravelling these things (besides it is more often w-umlaut than u-umlaut whic rounds unrounded front vowels, and that _v_ is usually preserved in inflected forms. I'll however readily admit that (1) I have a long-standing (30 years out of 39!) love affair with Icelandic/Old Norse and (2) my brain might well be otherwise wired than most when it comes to this phono-historical stuff(**); OTOH I e.g. get a headache from trying to make computers do as I want them to, which apparently comes rather easy at least to some of you guys! :-) (*)It is a seldom mentioned phonetic fact that rounded vowels tend to be more rounded the more closed they are, and that this effect is stronger in back rounded vowels than in front rounded vowels, so that [u] is usually the most rounded vowel. Admittedly degree of rounding has no phenemic significance in most languages -- heck, in most languages front vowels are all unrounded, back vowels all rounded --, though my L1 is an exception, so I *may* be more sensitive to this dimension, though I don't think so. (**)In my a-priori conlang family Sohlob a/i/u-umlaut serve to transform a 3-vowel system into a 9-vowel system -- albeit it later shrinks into a 6- or 5-vowel system, but introduces vowel harmony -- if you want it may be said to again become a (different) 3-vowel system plus a VH phoneme! As it happens I'm also working on a Romlang with umlaut, the most important feature of which is that number of nouns and adjectives will be expressed by changes in the stem-vowel. It will be nothing like a Germanic language otherwise, the idea is rather to come up with a lang superficially similar to (Old) French, but which arrived at that phonology by a rather different route (at least as far as the vowels are concerned). Henrik:
Moreover, 'ï¿œrjï¿œtur' is even an Icelandic word (meaning 'villain' :-)).
Frekar gaman! I didn't think of that!
I agree, vowel juxtapositions just have a certain coolnessfactor. Incidentally, /i:/ is also one of my favorite vowels. :DI love mailing lists with people who have favorite vowels. I'm not sure which is mine and whether there is a global maximum at all, but [1] is definitely one of the candidates.
Mine's gotta be [8+_w] aka [8\], even though it occurs in
my L1 -- my dad's dialect even had an [u\+_w] allophone!
My favorite consonant of course is [K].
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
I'm afraid the current situation in the Eastern
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