LINGUIST List 6.424

Fri 24 Mar 1995

Qs: Italian speaker, Vietnamese fonts, 'Yew'-rune, Japanese

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1. Ildiko Koch, Native Italian speaker needed
2. Krisadawan Hongladarom, Vietnamese fonts for McIntosh
3. , The 'yew'-rune
4. , Question about origin of Japanese

request for help of an Italian native-speaker
I'm teaching French and Italian at a German university. This ist the first
time I'm sending a message to the list. I'm dealing with contrastive lin-
guistics (valency and case rules in German and Italian verbs) and need
some help from an Italian native-speaker. Is there anyone in the "net"
who would agree to answer every now and then to my questions (di preferenza
in italiano...)?
Thanks for your help
Ildiko Koch
Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universittaet Greifswald
koch-irz.uni-greifswald.de.

Dear all,
 My colleague & I are writing a Vietnamese textbook. We need
Vietnamese fonts for McIntosh. Any suggestions on the fonts and how to
obtain them will be appreciated.
 Thank you,

 Krisadawan Hongladarom
 Dept. of Linguistics
 Chulalongkorn University
 Bangkok 10330

Some years ago I proposed that PIE /i/ in a laryngeal environment yielded a
Proto-Germanic vowel that I somewhat arbitrarily wrote as /i-/ (barred i),
rather than the high front /i/ found in non-laryngeal environments. This
enabled me to account for the fact that PIE /Hi/ often yields /e/ in various
Germanic languages (though never regularly), whereas non-laryngeal /i/ yields
only /i/. (Beitraege zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 1977,
for Old High German; Indogermanische Forschungen, 1984, for Old Norse)

I also proposed that there was a corresponding long /i-:/, mostly reflecting
PIE [0Hi] (0 = Hirt's schwa secundum), an alternate realization of /Hi/ as the
weak grade of /eHi/ or /oHi/; /i-:/ yielded either /e2:/ (e: secundum) or /i:/,
paralleling the split development of /i-/ to /i/ or /e/. (Beitraege zur
Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 1979)

Since the distribution of /i/ and /e/ ( /i-/ and of /i:/ and /e2:/ < /i-:/
varies from dialect to dialect, the final developments must be placed after the
Proto-Germanic period. I therefore proposed that the thirteenth rune of the
elder futhark, named after the yew and variously transcribed as dotted e or
double-dotted i, originally served to write these extra vowel phonemes. I
examined some Runic evidence in a 1979 article (Amsterdamer Beitraege zur
aelteren Germanistik), but the evidence was inconclusive, primarly because the
yew-rune is very rare.

I am not a Runic scholar and have concentrated since then on other areas. So I
ask: Does anyone know of any inscriptions found since 1975 or so which contain
this rune? Or of any other explanations of the yew-rune which have been
offered in the interim?

E-mail me or post, as you see fit. I will publish a summary if response
justifies it.

Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures University of Memphis
connollymsuvax.memphis.edu Formerly "Memphis State University"

Here's question I have and I dont know at all about it, but let's be
brave and ask:
What is the current status of the study of origin of Japnaese?

How firm is the evidence of the relatedness between Japanese and Korean?
What about the theroy of Japanese as part of southern langauges such as
southern India? Have many attempts made to compare Japanese with language
of microasia and other languages?

I will summarize and feed back if I get enough answers.

Best Reagards,

Kojiro Nabeshima, Linguistics University of California, Berkeley