Antonio Baroni
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Finnish Inserted Vowels: a Case of Phonologized Excrescence
Nordic Journal of Linguistics (2021), page 1 of 31 doi:10.1017/S033258652100007X ARTICLE Finnish inserted vowels: a case of phonologized excrescence Robin Karlin University of Wisconsin-Madison, Waisman Center, Madison, WI, 53705, USA Email for correspondence: [email protected] (Received 12 March 2019; revised 1 September 2020; accepted 10 December 2020) Abstract In this paper, I examine a case of vowel insertion found in Savo and Pohjanmaa dialects of Finnish that is typically called “epenthesis”, but which demonstrates characteristics of both phonetic excrescence and phonological epenthesis. Based on a phonological analysis paired with an acoustic corpus study, I argue that Finnish vowel insertion is the mixed result of phonetic excrescence and the phonologization of these vowels, and is related to second-mora lengthening, another dialectal phenomenon. I propose a gestural model of second-mora lengthening that would generate vowel insertion in its original phonetic state. The link to second-mora lengthening provides a unified account that addresses both the dialectal and phonological distribution of the phenomenon, which have not been linked in previous literature. Keywords: excrescence; epenthesis; Finnish; gestures; phonetics; phonology 1. Introduction In this paper, I examine a case of vowel insertion found in Savo and Pohjanmaa dialects of Finnish that has typically been analyzed as a phonological repair, but which demonstrates characteristics of both phonetic excrescence and phonological epenthesis. Using both acoustic data and a phonological analysis of the distribution, I argue that Finnish vowel insertion originated as a phonetic intrusion, but then became phonologized over time. I follow Hall (2006) in assuming that excrescent vowels are the result of gestural underlap, and argue that the original gestural underlap was caused by second-mora lengthening, another phenomenon present in these dialects. -
Lisu and Lahu 1 Abstract Introduction 75
Bulletin suisse de linguislique appliyuee, 691I, 1999,75-93 Publié dans Bulletin VALS-ASLA (Association suisse de linguistique appliquée) 69/1, 75-93, 1999 qui doit être utilisée pour toute référence à ce travail Standardisation of Transnational Minority Languages in Asia: Lisu and Lahu 1 David BRADLEY & Maya BRADLEY Abstract Lisu and Lahu are each spoken by large groups spread over southwestern China, northern Laos and Thailand, and northeastern Burma, with some Lahu in northern Vietnam and some Lisu in northeastern India. The status and corpus planning and educational policy for these minorities differ in each nation where they are spoken, which has led to the selection of more than one "standard" variety and the development of various competing orthographies. Diversity was created by religious and political divisions: Protestant missionaries prepared the earliest and most widely used orthographies, but Catholic and post-1950 Chinese Communist orthographies are also in use for Lahu; while Lisu has two very different Protestant orthographies and a post-1950 Chinese orthography in use, along with others that are no longer used. There are also competing centrifugal tendencies among some subgroups speaking divergent dialects, who wish to create their own orthographies and achieve some recognition for their own speech variety. For example, the Lahu Shi (Yellow Lahu) have created their own writing system; this is used among some refugees from Laos living in California and may soon be introduced in Thailand and elsewhere. Nevertheless, each of the two groups feels an internal unity, which is linguistically reflected in efforts to reunify the orthographies and maintain international contacts among leaders and language scholars. -
Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present (Impact: Studies in Language and Society)
<DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present"SUBJECT "Impact 18"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "220"WIDTH "150"VOFFSET "4"> Germanic Standardizations Impact: Studies in language and society impact publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics. General Editor Associate Editor Annick De Houwer Elizabeth Lanza University of Antwerp University of Oslo Advisory Board Ulrich Ammon William Labov Gerhard Mercator University University of Pennsylvania Jan Blommaert Joseph Lo Bianco Ghent University The Australian National University Paul Drew Peter Nelde University of York Catholic University Brussels Anna Escobar Dennis Preston University of Illinois at Urbana Michigan State University Guus Extra Jeanine Treffers-Daller Tilburg University University of the West of England Margarita Hidalgo Vic Webb San Diego State University University of Pretoria Richard A. Hudson University College London Volume 18 Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present Edited by Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbussche Germanic Standardizations Past to Present Edited by Ana Deumert Monash University Wim Vandenbussche Vrije Universiteit Brussel/FWO-Vlaanderen John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements 8 of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Germanic standardizations : past to present / edited by Ana Deumert, Wim Vandenbussche. -
From Semantics to Dialectometry
Contents Preface ix Subjunctions as discourse markers? Stancetaking on the topic ‘insubordi- nate subordination’ Werner Abraham Two-layer networks, non-linear separation, and human learning R. Harald Baayen & Peter Hendrix John’s car repaired. Variation in the position of past participles in the ver- bal cluster in Duth Sjef Barbiers, Hans Bennis & Lote Dros-Hendriks Perception of word stress Leonor van der Bij, Dicky Gilbers & Wolfgang Kehrein Empirical evidence for discourse markers at the lexical level Jelke Bloem Verb phrase ellipsis and sloppy identity: a corpus-based investigation Johan Bos 7 7 Om-omission Gosse Bouma 8 Neural semantics Harm Brouwer, Mathew W. Crocker & Noortje J. Venhuizen 7 9 Liberating Dialectology J. K. Chambers 8 0 A new library for construction of automata Jan Daciuk 9 Generating English paraphrases from logic Dan Flickinger 99 Contents Use and possible improvement of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Lan- guages in Danger Tjeerd de Graaf 09 Assessing smoothing parameters in dialectometry Jack Grieve 9 Finding dialect areas by means of bootstrap clustering Wilbert Heeringa 7 An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven dif- ferent native-language bakgrounds Vincent J. van Heuven & Charlote S. Gooskens 7 Impersonal passives in German: some corpus evidence Erhard Hinrichs 9 7 In Hülle und Fülle – quantiication at a distance in German, Duth and English Jack Hoeksema 9 8 he interpretation of Duth direct speeh reports by Frisian-Duth bilin- guals Franziska Köder, J. W. van der Meer & Jennifer Spenader 7 9 Mining for parsing failures Daniël de Kok & Gertjan van Noord 8 0 Looking for meaning in names Stasinos Konstantopoulos 9 Second thoughts about the Chomskyan revolution Jan Koster 99 Good maps William A. -
Sixth Periodical Report Presented to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe in Accordance with Article 15 of the Charter
Strasbourg, 1 July 2014 MIN-LANG (2014) PR7 EUROPEAN CHARTER FOR REGIONAL OR MINORITY LANGUAGES Sixth periodical report presented to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe in accordance with Article 15 of the Charter NORWAY THE EUROPEAN CHARTER FOR REGIONAL OR MINORITY LANGUAGES SIXTH PERIODICAL REPORT NORWAY Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation 2014 1 Contents Part I ........................................................................................................................................... 3 Foreword ................................................................................................................................ 3 Users of regional or minority languages ................................................................................ 5 Policy, legislation and practice – changes .............................................................................. 6 Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers – measures for following up the recommendations ................................................................................................................... 9 Part II ........................................................................................................................................ 14 Part II of the Charter – Overview of measures taken to apply Article 7 of the Charter to the regional or minority languages recognised by the State ...................................................... 14 Article 7 –Information on each language and measures to implement -
Pictograms: Purely Pictorial Symbols
toponymy course 10. Writing systems Ferjan Ormeling This chapter shows the semantic, phonetic and graphic aspects of language. It traces the development of the graphic aspects from Sumeria 3500BC, from logographic or ideographic via syllabic into alphabetic scripts resulting in a number of script families. It gives examples of the various scripts in maps (see underlined script names) and finally deals with combination of scripts on maps. 03/07/2011 1 Meaning, sound and looks What is the name? - Is it what it means? - Is it what it sounds? - Is it what it looks? 03/07/2011 2 Meaning: the semantic aspect As long as a name is what it means, both its sound and its looks (spelling) are only relevant as far as they support the meaning. The name ‘Nederland’ is wat it means to our neighbours: ‘Low country’. So they translate it for instance into ‘Pays- Bas’ (French) or Netherlands (English) or Niederlande (German), even though that does neither sound nor look like ‘Nederland’. To Romans and Italians, however, the names Qart Hadasht and Neapolis had never been what they meant (‘new towns’). So they became what they sounded: Carthago (to the Roman ear) and Napoli. 03/07/2011 3 Sound: the phonetic aspect As soon as a name is what it sounds, its meaning has become irrelevant. Its looks (spelling) then may or may not be adapted to its sound. The dominance of the phonetic aspect to a name (the ‘oral tradition’) allows the name to degenerate graphically. Eventually, the name may be adapted semantically to its perceived sound, through a process called ‘popular etymology’. -
Finnish Standardization of Finnish Orthography: from Reformists to National Awakeners
Finnish Standardization of Finnish orthography: From reformists to national awakeners Taru Nordlund 0. Introduction This article examines the standardization of Finnish orthography, concen- trating on the two periods of rapid development: the 16th and the 19th cen- turies. The first part discusses the role of the Western Church at the early stages of written Finnish: conversion to Christianity and especially the Lu- theran Reformation in the 16th century set the foundations for the usage of Finnish as a literary language. To provide a background to the standardiza- tion of orthography in the 16th and the 19th centuries, the spelling system of Modern Finnish is introduced in section 2. The following sections 3–5 discuss the orthography of the earliest writings and provide some examples of the problems that the first writers were faced with. The second external trigger for the evolution of Standard Finnish was European nationalism, which had reached Finland by the beginning of the 19th century. This era was characterized by a strong desire for nation-building, which was linguis- tically reflected in the process of standardization with its often heated de- bates about the “authenticity” or “purity” of the language. In section 6, aspects of 19th-century spelling are discussed. In most respects, the orthog- raphy of 19th-century Finnish resembles that of Modern Finnish. However, there were some debates on orthography that clearly reveal the nationalistic aspirations of the time. At the end of the article, one of these debates is discussed in more detail. DOI 10.1515/9783110288179.351, ©2017 Taru Nordlund, published by De Gruyter. -
Origins of the Canaanite Alphabet and West Semitic Consonants' Inventory
DOI 10.30842/alp2306573715317 ORIGINS OF THE CANAANITE ALPHABET AND WEST SEMITIC CONSONANTS’ INVENTORY A. V. Nemirovskaya St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg [email protected] Abstract. It has been not infrequently mentioned by Semitists that a few graphemes of the West Semitic consonantal alphabet had been multifunctional. This is witnessed, in particular, by transcriptions of Biblical names in Septuagint, Demotic transcriptions of Aramaic as well as by the Arabic alphabet, Aramaic by its origin, which twen- ty two graphemes were ultimately developed into twenty eight ones through inventing additional diacritics. The oldest firmly deciphered and convincingly interpreted variety of the West Semitic consonantal script was employed in Ugarit as early as the 13th century BC. Being contemporaneous with the epoch of the invention of the West Semitic consonantal script the most significant evidence is provided with Se- mitic words occasionally transcribed in Egyptian papyri from the New Kingdom. Examples collected (J. Hoch) demonstrate that one and the same Semitic consonant could be recorded variously with different Egyptian consonants used; even more crucial is that various Semitic consonants could be recorded with the same Egyptian one. E. de Rougé was the first one to state that the immediate proto- types of Semitic letters were to be sought among the Hieratic char- acters. W. Helck and K.-Th. Zauzich determined that the West Se- mitic alphabet comprised only those characters which had been used in “Egyptian syllabic writing”. Summarizing philological and histori- cal evidence does allow us to conclude that the Canaanite consonantal alphabet developed as a local adaptation of the Egyptian scribal prac- tice of recording non-Egyptian words. -
The Origin of the Alphabet: an Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis
Colless, Brian E. The origin of the alphabet: an examination of the Goldwasser hypothesis Antiguo Oriente: Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente Vol. 12, 2014 Este documento está disponible en la Biblioteca Digital de la Universidad Católica Argentina, repositorio institucional desarrollado por la Biblioteca Central “San Benito Abad”. Su objetivo es difundir y preservar la producción intelectual de la Institución. La Biblioteca posee la autorización del autor para su divulgación en línea. Cómo citar el documento: Colless, Brian E. “The origin of the alphabet : an examination of the Goldwasser hypothesis” [en línea], Antiguo Oriente : Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente 12 (2014). Disponible en: http://bibliotecadigital.uca.edu.ar/repositorio/revistas/origin-alphabet-goldwasser-hypothesis.pdf [Fecha de consulta:..........] . 03 Colless - Alphabet_Antiguo Oriente 09/06/2015 10:22 a.m. Página 71 THE ORIGIN OF THE ALPHABET: AN EXAMINATION OF THE GOLDWASSER HYPOTHESIS BRIAN E. COLLESS [email protected] Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand Summary: The Origin of the Alphabet Since 2006 the discussion of the origin of the Semitic alphabet has been given an impetus through a hypothesis propagated by Orly Goldwasser: the alphabet was allegedly invented in the 19th century BCE by illiterate Semitic workers in the Egyptian turquoise mines of Sinai; they saw the picturesque Egyptian inscriptions on the site and borrowed a number of the hieroglyphs to write their own language, using a supposedly new method which is now known by the technical term acrophony. The main weakness of the theory is that it ignores the West Semitic acrophonic syllabary, which already existed, and contained most of the letters of the alphabet. -
Online Activation of L1 Danish Orthography Enhances Spoken Word Recognition of Swedish
Nordic Journal of Linguistics (2021), page 1 of 19 doi:10.1017/S0332586521000056 ARTICLE Online activation of L1 Danish orthography enhances spoken word recognition of Swedish Anja Schüppert1 , Johannes C. Ziegler2, Holger Juul3 and Charlotte Gooskens1 1Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands; Email: [email protected], [email protected] 2Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive/CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, 3, place Victor Hugo, 13003 Marseille, France; Email: [email protected] 3Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Emil Holms Kanal 2, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark; Email: [email protected] (Received 6 June 2020; revised 9 March 2021; accepted 9 March 2021) Abstract It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their ortho- graphic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first- language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses dur- ing decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish. -
Notes on Complete Consonantal Assimilations. PUB DATE Apr 73 NOTE 11P
DOCUMENT RESUME ED 127 777 FL 006 759 AUTHOR Hutcheson, James W. TITLE Notes on Complete Consonantal Assimilations. PUB DATE Apr 73 NOTE 11p. JOURNAL CIT Working Papers in Linguistics; n14 p58-64 Apr 1973 EDRS PRICE MF-$0.83 HC-$1.67 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Arabic; *Articulation (Speech); Consonants; Finnish; Generative Phonology; Latin; *Linguistic Theory; *Phonological Units; *Phonology; Suprasegmentals; Synchronic Linguistics; Vowels; Yakut IDENTIFIERS Assimilation (Language); Sandhi ABSTRACT This paper is one of a number of studies within the conceptual framevork of natEral phonology, according to which phonological processes are of two kinds, context-free aril context-sensitive. Context-free changes can be explained by the character of the sounds themselves; context-sensitive processesare explained largely by the function of the actual processes and by the character of the sounds affected by them. This paper investigates the operation of complete consonantal assimilations within this framework. Complete assimilation results in the complete identity of the two sounds involved. Evidence from English casual speech is offered supporting the principle claiming that complete assimilations normally occur only when the segments involved are already very similar. Sandhi phenomena in Arabic and Yakut are shown to support this principle. Latin assimilations and Finnish consonant gradation are considered. The following points are emphasized:(1) Complete assimilations normally affect sounds already very similar; ti2) If relatively different sounds assimilate completely, so will less different sounds - assimilations operate hierarchically; (3) Nonphonological conditions can play a role in triggering assimilatory processes.(CHK) *********************************************************************** Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished * materials not available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort * * to obtain the best copy available. -
Physical Anthropology and the “Sumerian Problem”
Studies in Historical Anthropology, vol. 4:2004[2006], pp. 145–158 Physical anthropology and the “Sumerian problem” Arkadiusz So³tysiak Department of Historical Anthropology Institute of Archaeology, Warsaw University, Poland It is already 35 years since Andrzej Wierciñski has published his only paper on the physical anthropology of ancient Mesopotamia (1971). This short article was written in Polish and concerned a topic which has for many years been considered as very important by the international community of archaeologists and philologists, and especially by the scholars studying the ethnic history of Mesopotamia. This topic was usually called the “Sumerian problem”, and may be summarised as the speculations about the origin of Sumerians, the ethnic group which was universally considered to be the founder of the Mesopotamian civilisation. Research on the origins of the Sumerians was accidental in Professor Wierciñski’s studies, though it may be included in the larger series of his papers concerning the problems of ethnogenesis (eg. 1962, 1973, 1978). In spite of this marginality, it was perhaps the most exhaustive contribution of a physical anthropologist to the discussion about the “Sumerian problem” and for that reason it seems to be a good starting point for an essay about the contribution of physical anthropology to the research on the history of Mesopotamia. * * * The Sumerians were the first known ethnic group inhabiting Mesopotamia. It does not mean that they must have been the first settlers in that region, but is the simple result of the fact that it was they who had invented the system of writing and thus were able to make their ethnicity known to modern scholars.