Re: derivation help?

Clinton Moreland-Stringham wrote:
>
> heya!
>
>     So, I decided to go ahead with things, and am developing a "new" celtic lang
> without the meld with English. What I've been doing is taking Old irish words,
> deriving them in my head to what I think they should be, and then backtracking to
> how I got there. Very much an analeptic way of doing things (or is that proleptic?
> read Bohm to straighten it out). Anyway, I've come across a couble glitches I
> thought you folks might be able to help me with. I'll start with some standard
> transformation and the rules I found, and then go to the ones I didn't know how they
> got there. Any ideas on possible derivational rules would be greatly appreciated!
>
        [snip of all those interesting examples]

>
>     Okay, that should be enough to give the idea. On to my questions:
>
>     OI.  ana'al (anaal) 'breath' > A. an
>         -loss of finals as normal
>                  But what about that long a? Only short vowels are lost normally.
> Maybe an earlier rule that shortens long vowels in the final, nonacc syllable? Of
> course, all non-initial syll are nonaccented, so...
>
        I think that's pretty likely. I think Latin lost phonemic distinction
between long and short vowels that way: all unaccented vowels became
short and all accented vowels became long, and then the length was not
phonemic anymore.

>     OI. bendacht 'blessing' > A. bennaeth or benna'ath (long a)
>         - ch /X/ aspirates following plosive
>         - voiceless aspirates fricativized (/th/>/T/)
>         - vocalization of /X/ (as in Old English)
        What do you mean by vocalisation? disappearance?

>         - diphthongization of V (a>ae) OR lengthening of V (a>aa/a)
>         which makes more sense in terms of treatment of that vowel?
        Maybe lengthening of the vowel accompagning the disappearence of /X/...

 and how come the
> finals weren't lost? Which derivation do you like more?
>
        Simply because /X/ was still there when the rule of lost of final
consonnant applied, and this rule didn't apply when there was a
consonnant cluster.

>     OI. scethach 'emetic' > A. syetha/sietha (same problem as above)
>          -sc>sy/#_
>         -loss of final C
>     why no loss of final V?
>
        Analogy? Or the /X/ disappeared making the vowel long, so the vowel
didn't disappear, and after another shortening of unaccented vowels
occurred.

>     And one additional question : wouldn't this loss of finals cause an awful lot of
> monosyllabic and homonymous words?
>
        Not all the words in Old Irish are dissyllabic I suppose. And also you
didn't take into account factors like analogy, creation of new words,
derivations that take place of the underived word, shifts in meanings,
etc... And a few homophones are not that bad! :) . You can have
appearance of epenthetic vowels for clarity also, or other things. Not
all changes are purely related to sound. I don't think sound change is
blind (that's to say, unaware of PoS and things like that). And of
course don't forget the powerful tool which is analogy.

>     Any ideas are appreciated!!
>
        Not that many ideas I'm afraid... I hope the ones I gave will help you.

>     Clint
--
        Christophe Grandsire

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