Summary Details
| Query: |
Prothesis Before Single Consonant
|
|
| Author: | Katalin Balogne Berces | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Phonology
|
|
| Summary: |
Regarding query http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2894.html#1
Dear Linguists, Back in October 2004 I posted a query (No. 15.2894) concerning vowel prothesis before single word-initial consonants. I received quite a number of responses, for which I am extremely thankful. Here is the (alphabetical) list of those who replied: Tim Beasley, Ioana-Ruxandra Dascalu, Alain Dawson, Ivan A. Derzhanski, Laurence Labrune, Mikael Parkvall, C. Rajendran, Kevin Ryan, Hayim Sheynin, R?my Viredaz, Tomasz Wisniewski. I hereby apologize to all of them and everybody else interested for not posting this summary earlier. Based on the messages I received, I can conclude that prothesis before single consonants, just like before clusters (as in Spain ~ Espan~a) is phonotactically motivated. In some languages, certain consonants are only tolerated non-initially (say, intervocalically). When such languages borrow words with the illegal initial consonants, vowel prothesis takes place. The data I received come from various genetically unrelated languages: (1) There is a vowel prefixed before /r/ in Turkish. (2) Premodern Tamil added prothetic [i] to loanwords from languages like Sanskrit beginning with liquids: the great Indian epic the raamaayaNa (Valmiki's Ramayana), for example, goes into Tamil as iraamaayaNam (Kamban's Iramayanam), and one of its leading characters, Ram's brother lakSmaNa, becomes ilakSmaNar in Tamil (K. Ryan's examples). Also: Sanskrit lok- `world' > Tamil ulakam, Sanskrit rAj- `king, prince' > Tamil aracan / arayan. (3) Sanskrit to Malayalam: Ranga>Arangu (4) Sanskrit to Prakrit: Raama>.Iraama, laksmana> Ilakkana (5) Latin reg- `king' > Basque errege, Latin romam 'Rome' > erroma, French (?) riz 'rice' > irrisa, etc. (6) Aragones (Spanish dialect) word initial r > arr, e.g. arrempugar from reempujar (7) Slavic rus-, ros- `Russian' > Altaic (e.g. Mongolian) urus-, oros- (whence also Hungarian orosz 'Russian'), also pre-modern Japanese orosia 'Russia' (8) Mongolian oros 'Russian' (as in (7) above), araaju 'radio' (9) Perhaps also Greek erythros (cf. Eng. red), eleutheros (cf. Lat. liber) (T. Wisniewski's examples) Notice that all of the examples above involve originally liquid-initial words. R. Viredaz even expressed his doubts that there are any examples with any other consonants. A. Dawson's Picard example in fact applies to [k]: the word can ('field', usually pronounced as [ka~]) has the form [eka~] with an epenthetic [e] in a small number of dialect areas. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only example, which makes it rather like an isolated case, although I haven't checked this Picard dialect. M. Parkvall's examples come from the Portuguese creoles of the Bight of Benin islands, where plenty of words with non-branching onsets in Portuguese have an extra vowel at the beginning. This may be interpreted as a fossilised Portuguese definite article (MASC /o/ ~ FEM /a/) and/or may have been brought about by a ban in Edo, one of the main substrates, on nouns that begin with a consonant. Some examples: /ope/ 'foot' (< p?) /oventu/ 'wind' (< ventu) /ose/ 'sky' (< c?u) /opa ~ upa/ 'tree' (< pau) /omali/ 'sea' (< mar) /um?/ 'hand, underarm' (< m?o) All the examples are indeed nouns, which indicates that the prothetic vowel has become a kind of grammatical marker of nounhood, and then it is not surprising that the type of the initial consonant of the target noun does not make a difference. This prothesis, then, is grammatically rather than (purely) phonologically governed. A final interesting point is that sometimes a prothetic vowel before a single initial consonant originates in prothesis to avoid an illicit initial cluster, but as a later development the original cluster has been simplified, e.g. French e-cole understand I. Dascalu's data correctly, Greek aleuron ('flour'), aleuo (verb 'to grind'), and Armenian alam (verb 'to grind'), aleur ('flour') illustrate the same. The major conclusion, then, is that the overwhelming majority of (clearly phonotactically motivated) vowel protheses affect liquid-initial words, which may simply be a consequence of a cross-linguistic dispreference of liquids at the left edge. The question is whether it is really only liquids that are so dispreferred, and if so then why. Thank you again to all of you, and I hope you'll have a very happy 2005. Best, Katalin Balogne Berces ELTE-PPKE, Budapest, Hungary |
|
| LL Issue: | 16.38 | |
| Date Posted: | 11-Jan-2005 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
|
Back |
||
|
|
||
|
Sums main page
|
||
|
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
|
Report Broken Link
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents. |
|
