Re: Compensatory Lengthening

Quoting Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>:

> Rob Haden wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone could tell me what the most common conditions
> > are
> > for compensatory lengthening to arise.  Thanks!
> >
> I'd say: almost always due to loss of some segment. Frequent in -VC1C2V-
> esp. where C1 is a non-stop, so -V[fricative, nasal, liquid, semivowel, h,
> ?]CV- could > V:CV

I thought compensatory lengthening was by _definition_ due to the loss of a
segment.

[snip]
> There's also coalescence of two V in hiatus (i.e. V0V-- esp. like vowels) so
> that e.g. -aa- > a:, -ao- maybe > O: --but again, I'm not sure this would be
> called compensatory either.
Hm. The later surely is coalescence, but the first might perhaps be considered a
kind of compensatory lengthening.

Another kind of changes that I've seen called compensatory lengthening is VCV >
V:C. The "objective" here is presumably to perserve prosodic length/mora count.

                                                             Andreas