Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!news2.arglkargh.de!news.karotte.org!news.szaf.org!inka.de!mips.inka.de!.POSTED.localhost!not-for-mail From: Christian Weisgerber Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang Subject: Re: Somewheres Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 19:26:42 -0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 19:26:42 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: lorvorc.mips.inka.de; posting-host="localhost:::1"; logging-data="15323"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@mips.inka.de" User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (FreeBSD) Bytes: 3748 Lines: 60 On 2024-09-02, Peter Moylan wrote: > Is there a natural tendency for languages to lose final syllables or > final consonants? If you take the big picture view, the answer is certainly yes, but the details vary wildly. > I can't think of any examples in Germanic languages, Take PGmc *hringaz > OE hring > PDE ring. Proto-Germanic *-az was the counterpart to the ubiquitous Latin ending -us, Greek -os, but it was mostly lost in West Germanic.[1] Much later, along the way from Old English [hrɪŋɡ] to Present Day English [rɪŋ], final [g] after [ŋ] was lost. Strikingly, Middle English lost final -e and, inconsistenly, -en, which is intimately tied to the collapse of the declension system. > and I don't know enough about other language families. Proto-Slavic went through a stage where the language had only open syllables, i.e., all syllables ended in a vowel. Getting there clearly entailed the loss of some syllable- and word-final consonants. > This thread has provided examples in Spanish. Many Spanish words that end on a consonant have clearly lost a final -e in the past, think este/ese/AQUEL vs. Portuguese este/esse/aquele. The debuccalization of post-vocalic [s] > [h] isn't limited to final position, though: mismo [mihmo]. > French lost a lot of final consonants (in speech, but not in > writing) centuries ago. The sound shifts from Vulgar Latin to Old French were brutal. One striking change is the loss of all vowels in the final syllable other than a, which became e [ə]. In a nutshell, this is why you have -o/-e/-a in Spanish and Italian, but -/-/-e in the corresponding French forms. If you look at adjectives, the Old French masculine would then end in a consonant, the feminine in [ə]. This stage is still preserved in the spelling. Later, most final consonants would drop, as well as final [ə], so in modern spoken French it's the masculine forms that now end in a vowel and the feminine ones that end in a consonant. [1] If you know German, the nominative singular masculine ending -er of determiners and strong adjectives is from PGmc *-az. That Old High German conserved this but Old English didn't might have been another subtle factor in the collapse of English nominal declension. OHG also innovated a nom. sg. neuter ending -eȥ (modern -es) by misanalyzing part of the stem of neuter pronouns as an ending. That's two endings that could have remained distinct during the fall of -e and -en in Middle English if only Old English had had them in the first place. Details, details. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de