Since stress accent must fall on one of the first two syllables in Aegean (and in later Minoan) we might say that accent placement is left-handed. By dividing the Aegean protoword into feet of two syllables consisting of trochees (or strong followed by weak syllables), then we see how Cyprian consistently erodes weak syllables towards the left and how this explains Etruscan's later shape. Let's simply make up some example forms to illustrate my theory at work, without being obstructed for now by the separate issue of the validity of any of my reconstructions:
| Aegean | Cyprian | |
| **áinatʰo [ˈai . na . ˌtʰo] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ ) | → | **áinatʰu [ˈai. na . tʰu] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯) |
| **táḳalimi [ˈta . kˤa . ˌli . mi] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘ ) | → | **táklim [ˈtak . lim] ( ¯ ˘ ) |
| **kápari [ˈka . pa . ˌri] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ ) | → | **kápri [ˈkap . ri] ( ¯ ˘ ) |
| **sarópa [sa . ˈro . pa] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ ) | → | **srupʰ [ˈsrupʰ] ( ¯ ) |
| **takíru [ta . 'ki . ru] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ ) | → | **tákru ['tak . ru] ( ¯ ˘ ) |
Since stop+stop sequences are simply not found in Etruscan or related languages, some rule or rules must have repaired or avoided these logically inevitable conflicts. Simple onset deletion is a common cluster-fighting strategy in world languages and this would produce **kir, although this would also surely create a tsunami of homophones! (That is, we'd see that a long list of terms like **takíru, **kʰakíra, **pakíri, etc. had all merged to **kir. Surely not.) Seeing it from this angle, onset deletion doesn't pass muster.
Lenition of the offending onset is barely a better strategy to avoid conflict in this respect because similar issues resurface. While **takíru could always plausibly yield **skír if lenition were so, what about a word like **pakíri which couldn't possibly produce **fkír in Etruscan! We might appeal to a mixture of lenition and onset deletion, I suppose, but now we're already multiplying hypotheses and assuming much too much.
By contrast, accent shift is in this case far more natural than wholesale onset deletion or piecemeal lenition. It also offers some added benefits besides its simplicity, obviously one of them being avoidance of homophony if nothing else. Also since the stress was already largely on the first syllable, this leftward stress shift would only help to pin an occasionally wandering accent permanently onto the first syllable (as in Proto-Germanic).
So accent regularization, solving cluster conflicts, preserving inherited consonantism, and avoiding troublesome homophony are a lot of things this strategy of simple stress accent shift has to offer that make it a win-win over other ideas pushed by Tropylium in my commentbox. Thus **takíru becomes Cyprian **tákru (not **tkir, **kir, or **zkir).
The way I'm reading this rule is that you supposed an accent shift occurred during the syncope to deal with the clusters coming into being.
ReplyDeleteWhile I technically see no objection, history seems to teach us that sound laws act sufficiently quick enough that you can't really have an other sound law take place inside another sound law.
That's why we make relative chronologies of sound laws, and don't have them conincide.
For that to apply in this case it'd mean the accent shift took place before the syncope.
The accent shift itself seems odd, I have never heard of a Stop-Vowel-Stop or actually any type of consonant dependent accent attraction. What is the phonetic motivation for a stop-vowel-stop syllable to attract the accent? What is different about that type of syllable from say stop-vowel-liquid that it feels a stronger need to attract the accent?
But if you are indeed implying that the accent shift took place to avoid clusters, I'd be very interested in an example in any language that had convincingly had this happen, because it seems very unlikely to me.
The similarities between our debate and that published in Topintzi, Onsets: Suprasegmental and Prosodic Behaviour (2010) on quirky Australian sound changes makes me chuckle.
ReplyDeleteOkay let me respond to you in greater depth, PhoeniX.
ReplyDeletePhoeniX: "While I technically see no objection, history seems to teach us that sound laws act sufficiently quick enough that you can't really have an other sound law take place inside another sound law."
No. Some laws are quick, some are not. That's what history teaches us. So this claim is empty as well as the idea that "rules can't exist within rules" which would speak against analyzing anything in the universe if it weren't for the fact that this reasoning is false.
"The accent shift itself seems odd, I have never heard of a Stop-Vowel-Stop or actually any type of consonant dependent accent attraction."
In Hirt's Law, specifically laryngeals attract accent in Balto-Slavic. We may pose your same questions on this established law as well.
I have a new thought. In this crazy obsession we seem to be having with finding objection to reason rather than reason to objection, we've forgotten all the possibilities that need to be ruled out first before any proposal can be truly deemed 'impossible' or even 'unlikely'. In a case of SVSV'- (S = stop; V' = accented vowel), we may not understand exactly why the accent would shift between two stops and therefore get mentally stuck on the simple notion that the stops themselves seem to be attracting stress rather than more subtle associated factors.
ReplyDeleteRather than looking further, people have been rejecting the notion outright because it can't be conceived why stop and accent would interact this way. I consider this assumptive reasoning which is why I'm admittedly frustrated with the commenter input thus far.
For instance, let's say that the stop immediately before the stressed vowel had developed pre-glottalization/pre-aspiration. With the leftward movement of the aspirate/glottal stop feature of aspirate and non-aspirate stops, the segment is free to merge with the pretonic vowel, causing added length amidst impending syncope (ie. [SVSV'] → [SVhSV'] → [SV.SV']). This also implies merging of aspirated and non-aspirated stops in these special cases.
Naturally, as per countless other linguistic examples worldwide, the added "heaviness" of the lengthened syllable could in itself easily help to retract stress and to avoid syncope in the otherwise offending syllable.
This is one possibility but there may be more. This is why I don't accept the objections so far raised by my commenters as decisive.
You might be right that I'm being to skeptical about a rule that seems to work with perfectly definable conditions. Because, after all, if the conditions work they work.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem here for me, not having too much knowledge of the languages, is that your proposal lacks a big exhibition of cognates, but only the reconstructed words.
It would be great if you could give cognates of these reconstructed words that can show that the laws work perfectly.
Yes, you're of course correct. I mean this to be just a "what-if" discussion.
ReplyDeleteI want people to keep in mind that our discussion is built on the self-evident observation that Syncope as a necessary implication of Minoan-Etruscan relationship when comparing the apparent phonotactic structure of both languages overall. Etruscan simply tolerates greater variation in syllable shape than Minoan and this directly points to Syncope.
So if Syncope in Pre-Proto-Etruscan is taken as inevitable, so too are corollary rules to handle invalid clustering just like any other natural, human language.
So despite a lack of direct proof of how this language would have dealt with this, I know that my extrapolated rule is firmly within reasonable speculation.
The kind of evidence from other languages PhoeniX asks, may be found in Germanic. As we know, initial accent was early introduced, except in prefixes like ge-, ga-. During the Scandinavian syncope, these prefixes were either lost, contracted (ON (g)nóg, cf. Ger. genug ‘enough’), or – interestingly – got the initial accent, as in ON pl. gǫtvar ‘armour’, as opposed to OHG gizouwa id.
ReplyDeleteOK, some objections not reliant on the lack of parallels for your proposed change (also, thanks to Gråhatt for actually finding such a case).
ReplyDelete1) You simultaneously state that
"Simple onset deletion (…) would also surely create a tsunami of homophones"
and
"stress was already largely on the first syllable"
which are at direct odds. For onset simplification to produce numerous homophones, you need numerous onsets to come about in the first place, don't you?
2) You still have not shown any actual example exhibiting the change. And it may be a while before you can: as long as your only clue for original Aegean accent is this syncope, every example where we have an Etruscan vowel remaining between two stops not only can, but must be reconstructed with stress on that vowel (to place it backwards without evidence for that being the case for that particular word would be ad hoc). A possible conclusion from this, which you have not address'd (I grant I haven't brought it up before either) is that in Proto-Aegean words of a shape such as **takíru simply didn't exist for whatever pre-Aegean reason (for one example, lenition of intervocalic pretonic stops; for another, stress was always initial and the development of onset clusters involved Slavic-like metathesis; for a third, words with postinitial accent came from infixation of VC elements where none of the C was a stop; for a fourth, it was an accidental gap; for a fifth …).
You may contrast this with the example of Hirt's Law, where the reconstruction of the players, ie. PIE laryngeals and accent can be done without recourse to Balto-Slavic itself.
As for "too much change being scary": you're probably seen Phoenix' recent post on just how "Kartvelian-like" a Japanese-like language can turn?
I'd also like to remind I don't consider the proposal impossible; I just don't consider the other choices impossible either — and as long as any hard evidence either way is lacking, this argument we're having is made of air, so let's not heat it too much ;)
Also:
our discussion is built on the self-evident observation that Syncope as a necessary implication of Minoan-Etruscan relationship
"Necessary condition" would seem to be better, as your Etruscan-Minoan etymologies appear to largely have the shape:
1) we have Etruscan word blah;
2) pre-syncope, this would be baláha; thus, we can compare it with
3a) Minoan balaha, which could plausibly have the same meaning, or
3b) with Greek b(a)lakʰa, which we can now explain as a loan from Minoan (/Cyprian/etc.)
Without assuming syncope, you cannot rule out the scenarios such as Minoan being a language unrelated to Etruscan, which has loaned words from Etruscan or an ancestor of it, resolving consonant clusters by vowel insertion. Or that they both loaned the words from some third source. Or that the similarity is coincidental and the Minoan words actually do not mean anything similar to the Etruscan.
(But I digress…)
OK, some objections not reliant on the lack of parallels for your proposed change (also, thanks to Gråhatt for actually finding such a case).
ReplyDelete1) You simultaneously state that
"Simple onset deletion (…) would also surely create a tsunami of homophones"
and
"stress was already largely on the first syllable"
which are at direct odds. For onset simplification to produce numerous homophones, you need numerous onsets to come about in the first place, don't you?
2) You still have not shown any actual example exhibiting the change. And it may be a while before you can: as long as your only clue for original Aegean accent is this syncope, every example where we have an Etruscan vowel remaining between two stops not only can, but must be reconstructed with stress on that vowel (to place it backwards without evidence for that being the case for that particular word would be ad hoc). A possible conclusion from this, which you have not address'd (I grant I haven't brought it up before either) is that in Proto-Aegean words of a shape such as **takíru simply didn't exist for whatever pre-Aegean reason (for one example, lenition of intervocalic pretonic stops; for another, stress was always initial and the development of onset clusters involved Slavic-like metathesis; for a third, words with postinitial accent came from infixation of VC elements where none of the C was a stop; for a fourth, it was an accidental gap; for a fifth …).
You may contrast this with the example of Hirt's Law, where the reconstruction of the players, ie. PIE laryngeals and accent can be done without recourse to Balto-Slavic itself.
As for "too much change being scary": you're probably seen Phoenix' recent post on just how "Kartvelian-like" a Japanese-like language can turn?
I'd also like to remind I don't consider the proposal impossible; I just don't consider the other choices impossible either — and as long as any hard evidence either way is lacking, this argument we're having is made of air, so let's not heat it too much ;)
Also:
our discussion is built on the self-evident observation that Syncope as a necessary implication of Minoan-Etruscan relationship
"Necessary condition" would seem to be better, as your Etruscan-Minoan etymologies appear to largely have the shape:
1) we have Etruscan word blah;
2) pre-syncope, this would be baláha; thus, we can compare it with
3a) Minoan balaha, which could plausibly have the same meaning, or
3b) with Greek b(a)lakʰa, which we can now explain as a loan from Minoan (/Cyprian/etc.)
Without assuming syncope, you cannot rule out the scenarios such as Minoan being a language unrelated to Etruscan, which has loaned words from Etruscan or an ancestor of it, resolving consonant clusters by vowel insertion. Or that they both loaned the words from some third source. Or that the similarity is coincidental and the Minoan words actually do not mean anything similar to the Etruscan.
(But I digress…)
Tropylium, the formula of your comments involves a trollish ramble of refutations of everything, following by misinterpretations of my words and a big stream of ad hoc possibilities that you yourself haven't thought through. I'm not playing that game anymore and I'll be brief with you from now on.
ReplyDeleteIf you think that "Simple onset deletion (…) would also surely create a tsunami of homophones" and "stress was already largely on the first syllable" are at direct odds, I pity your reading skills. "Largely" simply refers to "greater than 50% of the vocabulary". Reread and rethink.
"is that in Proto-Aegean words of a shape such as **takíru simply didn't exist"
This is an example of your ad hoc, unexplained "alternative possibilities" that no one has to respond to because it's your onus.
"(But I digress…)"
That's all you ever do, I'm afraid.