LINGUIST List 2.366

Friday, 26 July 1991

Qs: Stieber's Law, Kartvelian, Suffix, Character Encoding

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Stieber's Law
2. Alexis Manaster Ramer, A query regarding Mama and Dada
3. Margaret Fleck, X-gate
4. Geoffrey Russom, Re: Character Encoding

---(Forwarded from: Alexis Manaster RamerWAYNEMTS.BITNET, Dated: Thu, 25 Jul 91
 22:52:40 EDT)---
A query regarding the history of phonology:
 In the 1930's a Polish linguist named Stieber stated the
principle that an analogical change could not produce a new
phonemic contrast in a language. However, he does not claim
any originality, so I wonder if anyone knows who first came
up with this idea. Try as I might, I fail to find anything
like it in the writings of Baudouin, Ulaszyn, etc.
Also, if anyone has any comments on the validity of this law,
I would be interested. In my 1981 dissertation "How abstruse
is phonology?" I tried to debunk all the classic counterexamples
to this law, and am thinking of publishing the relevant material
soon.

I am preparing a brief article arguing that the well-known Kartvelian
words mama 'father' and deda 'mother', celebrated for the way in which
they reverse the expected sound-meaning mapping, are etymologically
'man' and 'woman', resp. I would be grateful for any information
on the following:
 (a) Has anybody claimed this before?
 (b) Does anybody know other cases of mama-type words for 'father'
 or dada-type words for 'mother'?
 (c) Does anybody know of other cases where 'man' -> 'father'
 or 'woman' -> mother?

So does English now have a suffix '-gate'?
 Watergate
 Irangate
 Contragate
 Muldergate (South African)
 Inkathagate
Margaret

Thanks to Ken Whistler for his information on the politics of the
encoding debate. One question: who is representing the interests
of scholars who work on dead languages? King Alfred can hardly
be expected to send a representative on behalf of Old English.
 Wes hal,
 Rick Russom