Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

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sangi39
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

Consonant gradation-wise, you could have:

Code: Select all

pp >  p >  b
     bb >  b > v
          vv > v
     ff >  f > v
tt >  t >  d > z
     dd >  d > z
          zz > z
     ss >  s > z
     ts > dz > z
cc >  c >  ɟ > ʒ
     ɟɟ >  ɟ > ʒ
     tʃ > ʒʒ > ʒ
     ʃʃ >  ʃ > ʒ
kk >  k >  g > ʁ
     gg >  g > ʁ
          ʁʁ > ʁ
     xx >  x > ʁ
qq >  q >  ʔ
          ʕʕ > ʕ
     ħħ >  ħ > ʕ
     hh >  h

mp > mb > mm > m
nt > nd > nn > n
nc > nɟ > ɲɲ > ɲ
nk > ng > ŋŋ > ŋ

          ll > l
          rr > r
          ww > w
          jj > j
Basically, geminates shorten, short voicless sounds voice and short voiced sounds become voiced fricatives with some minor irregularities (which I think are still somewhat plausible, e.g. q > ʔ and ts > dz > z. tʃ > ʒʒ bugged me a little bit, but if you said that some instances of ʒʒ derived from an earlier (voiced affricates seem somewhat unstable cross-linguistically, so it's not far-fetched, IMO) then it stills fits in with the pattern. This might even mean that if any environments arise where "reverse gradation" occurs, where the weak grade appears where, generally speaking, the strong grade would appear (happens in Finnish for diachronic reasons), then not all instances of ʒʒ will undergo fortition, since some would come from tʃ > dʒ while other would come from original ʒʒ).

You could, if you wanted to, go one step further and have /v z ʒ ʁ ʕ/ become [w r j 0 0] under the same "weakening" conditions (which would create two instances of vowel clusters due to the loss of /ʁ ʕ/ when they appear as the onset of unstressed closed syllables, if they were preceded by an open syllable, e.g. ['tu.ʁan] > ['tu.an].

The initial condition could have been for this process to affect the onsets of unstressed, closed syllables, e.g. ['takka] > ['tak:a] vs. ['takkan] > ['takan] and then the initial condition, through, say, loss of some final consonants (opening up the syllable) or the loss of some intervocalic consononants (creating, in some instances, new closed syllables) could then cause the alternation to become grammatically, rather than phonologically, determined.

You could, as others have said, throw in palatalisation before either vowel syncope or a vowel merger. Some of your long vowels, for example, could have come from older diphthongs, e.g. [iy] > [y:], with the original triggering palatalisation, e.g. ['tiy.ma] > ['tʲiy.ma] > [tʲy:.ma] > [tsy:.ma] or something like that. If the diphthongs came from vowel clusters forming across morpheme boundaries, then some of the alternations might cause grammatically triggered palatalisation.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Trebor »

Thanks for all of your advice, Sangi39. [:)]

How could short vs. long vowels play a role here? Would these examples be plausible?

'young woman' (SG, AGT): /flin/
(DL, AGT): /fli:no:m/
(PL, AGT): /flin:æʃ/

'husband' (SG, AGT): /wɑʕɑtʃ/
(DL, AGT): /wɑ:ʕɑtʃo:m/
(PL, AGT): /wɑʕɑ:tʃæj/

'chief/leader' (SG, AGT): /ħyt/
(DL, AGT): /ħy:do:m/
(PL, AGT): /ħyt:/ (with the plural suffix disappearing in some of the more common words)

It also seems apropos to mention here that I'd like to throw a lot of irregularity into the system, as I really like the 'broken plurals' of Arabic:

'child': /ɾo:h/
/ɾoho:m/
/ɾwɛh/

'father': /bɛʔ, bɛjɨ/ (the second now being only dialectal)
/be:jo:m/
/ʔɛbːeː/

'immediate family': /vːɛʁ/
/ve:ʁo:m/
/v:ɛjɛʁ/

Edit: I also have a handful of verbs where tense or transitivity is distinguished by a change in vowel/consonant length:

'to help' (PRES): /lyk:-/
(PST): /ly:k-/

'to close' (INTR): /hæn-/
(TR): /hæ:n-/

How, if possible, could one make all of these elements (consonant gradation, vowel quantity/quality shifts, unproductive plural prefixes and productive plural suffixes) fit together into a naturalistic system?

Edit2: A couple of minor things fixed.

Edit3: Redundant dashes removed.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by DesEsseintes »

I'm toying with creating a lang with consonant gradation. The thread is here. For now, the project is called Preposterous.

The patterns I've got so far are as follows:

mb mbʷ → mm mmʷ → m mʷ → m mʷ
nd ndʷ → nn nnʷ → n nʷ → n nʷ
nd͡ʒ nd͡ʒʷ → ɲɲ ɲɲʷ → ɲ ɲʷ → ɲ ɲʷ
ŋg ŋgʷ → ŋŋ ŋŋʷ → ŋ ŋʷ → ŋ ŋʷ
ɴɢ ɴɢʷ → ɴɴ ɴɴʷ → ɴ ɴʷ → ɴ ɴʷ

pp ppʷ → pp ppʷ → p pʷ → ɸ ɸʷ
tt ttʷ → tt ttʷ → t tʷ → θ θʷ
tt͡s tt͡sʷ → tt͡s tt͡sʷ → t͡s t͡sʷ → s sʷ
tt͡ʃ tt͡ʃʷ → tt͡ʃ tt͡ʃʷ → t͡ʃ t͡ʃʷ → ʃ ʃʷ
kk kkʷ → kk kkʷ → k kʷ → Ø w
qq qqʷ → qq qqʷ → q qʷ → h hʷ

hpʼ hpʷʼ → hpʼ hpʷʼ → pʼ pʷʼ → ɸʼ ɸʷʼ
htʼ htʷʼ → htʼ htʷʼ → tʼ tʷʼ → θʼ θʷʼ
ht͡sʼ ht͡sʷʼ → ht͡sʼ ht͡sʷʼ → t͡sʼ t͡sʷʼ → sʼ sʷʼ
ht͡ʃʼ ht͡ʃʷʼ → ht͡ʃʼ ht͡ʃʷʼ → t͡ʃʼ t͡ʃʷʼ → ʃʼ ʃʷʼ
hkʼ hkʷʼ → hkʼ hkʷʼ → kʼ kʷʼ → ʔ ʔʷ
hqʼ hqʷʼ → hqʼ hqʷʼ → qʼ qʷʼ → dunno

ɸɸ ɸɸʷ → ββ ββʷ → β βʷ → β βʷ
θθ θθʷ → ðð ððʷ → ð ðʷ → ð ðʷ
ss ssʷ → zz zzʷ → z zʷ → z zʷ
ʃʃ ʃʃʷ → jj jjʷ → j jʷ → j jʷ

hɸ hɸʷ → ɦβʼ ɦβʷʼ → βʼ βʷʼ → βʼ βʷʼ
hθ hθʷ → ɦðʼ ɦðʷʼ → ðʼ ðʷʼ → ðʼ ðʷʼ
hsʼ hsʷʼ → ɦzʼ ɦzʼ → zʼ zʼ → zʼ zʼ
hʃʼ hʃʷʼ → ɦjʼ ɦjʷʼ → jʼ jʷʼ → jʼ jʷʼ

ld ldʷ → ll llʷ → l lʷ → l lʷ
ld͡ʒ ld͡ʒʷ → ʎʎ ʎʎʷ → ʎ ʎʷ → ʎ ʎʷ
lg lgʷ → ʟʟ ʟʟʷ → ʟ ʟʷ → ʟ ʟʷ


I just wanted to share that as they're a bit different from the patterns Sangi posted.

sangi, I would also be interested to hear what you think of them, since you gave such excellent advice to Trebor here. [:)]
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by gach »

Trebor wrote:If I take the Uralic historical development of consonant gradation as a model and say that this feature arose because of stress on the first, third, fifth, etc. syllables, what rules should I create?
How could short vs. long vowels play a role here?
It's entirely up to you how you decide to build your system and I shouldn't be making the creative decision for you. If you are going for a stress based system, what you want to figure out are the rules for strengthening or weakening of the consonant grades with relation to the location of the consonants to stress bearing syllables. However, if I look at some of your last examples where you have the vowel alternations, it seems that you have in mind some sort of mora preserving changes where making a syllable closed will cause a long vowel to shorten and give you paradigms where short vowels and geminate consonants alternate with long vowels and single consonants.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

One system I had, in a vague experimental conlang, and this kind of summed it up:

Code: Select all

1a: lakki  > lakki > lakki: > lakki: > lakk@j > lakka
1b: lakkin > lakin > la:kin > la:ki  > lauki  > luki

2a: laki   > laki  > la:ki: > la:ki: > lauk@j > luka
2b: lakin  > lagin > la:gin > la:gi  > laugi  > lugi

3a: laggi  > laggi > laggi: > laggi: > lagg@j > lagga
3b: laggin > lagin > la:gin > la:gi  > laugi  > lugi

4a: lagi   > lagi  > la:gi: > la:gi: > laug@j > luga
4b: lagin  > lajin > la:jin > la:ji  > lauji  > luji
Basically

1) Consonant gradation occurred in phonologically determined environments (unstressed syllables, lenition, etc.)
2) Vowels lengthened in open syllables
3) Certain syllable coda consonants were lost, causing both vowel length and consonant gradation to become phonemic and grammatically determined
4) Long vowels became diphthongs
5) Those diphthongs became short vowels

The result was that words that had qualitative consonant gradation also underwent vowel changes while words with qualitative consonant gradation did not.

How stable such a system is, I don't know, but I assume, given Germanic languages and Semitic languages, it might be able to stick around for a fair while, and might even be able to handle umlaut and palatalisation:

Code: Select all

1a: lakka > lakk@ > lakka (nothing)
1b: luki  > lytS@ > ljutSa (i-umlaut, palatalisation, vowel breaking)

2a: luka  > lok@  > loka (a-umlaut)
2b: lugi  > lydZ@ > ljudZa (i-umlaut, palatalisation, vowel breaking)

3a: lagga > lagg@ > lagga (nothing)
3b: lugi  > lydZ@ > ljudZa (i-umlaut, palatalisation, vowel breaking)

4a: luga  > log@  > loga (a-umlaut)
4b: luji  > lyj@  > ljuja (i-umlaut, vowel breaking)
Analogy might kick in somewhere along the line, especially where sound shifts become more and more determined by grammatical conditions than the phonological conditions that originally triggered them, but, assuming all of these sound changes are plausible, it kind of gives you an idea of what kinds of changes can occur in related forms of the same word, e.g. lakki ~ lakkin > lakka ~ ljutSa.

I think other users might be able to get a handle on how stable or unstable this system might be. I just threw together a series of sound changes to see where it could go.

(getting late, so I decided to switch to X-SAMPA)


DesEsseintes wrote:sangi, I would also be interested to hear what you think of them, since you gave such excellent advice to Trebor here. [:)]
I'll definitely have a look over them when I get a chance [:)]

EDIT: Not bad, and not too difficult to follow. I think my main problem with it is the attempt to make each pattern four stages long, which doesn't sit well with me. The way consonant gradation is normally presented is basically from a strong grade to a weak grade, so if no change occurs, phonetically, then there has been no change in the grade. So "pp ppʷ → pp ppʷ → p pʷ" doesn't quite make all that much sense since you'd still have to specify under what conditions /pp ppʷ/ switch from the strong grade to the weak grade and where the grade does not change.

Given that consonant gradation, for all sounds which undergo it as determined by the original trigger, undergo similar changes under similar circumstances, where /pp ppʷ → pp ppʷ/, you'd also expect /mb mbʷ/ → /mb mbʷ/ rather than /mb mbʷ/ → /mm mmʷ/... If that makes sense.

Now, I suppose you could come up with some previous state where a given sound, let's say, /hp/ shifted to /pp/ in the weak grade (alongside original /pp/ > weak grade /p/) and then the original strong grade /hp/ merged into /pp/, which would then cause a level of irregularity in the system, since some instances of /pp/ would remain the same in the weak grade while others would shift to /p/ (this might be overridden by analogy, with all instances of /pp/ in the same grammatical environment shifting to weak grade /p/).

Similarly, you'd have to explain "m mʷ → m mʷ".

If some chains are three stages long while others are four stages, I don't see that being much of a problem. The same thing happens, IIRC, in Finnish and in the example I provided, some chains are four stages long while others are just two stages, because each step represents a shift from a strong grade to a weak grade. In Finnish, for example, /t/ is the weak grade of /tt/ but also the strong grade counterpart of /d/, but (to my knowledge, someone might know better), there aren't (many?) instances of /t/ remaining /t/ where, say, /mp/ shifts to /mm/.

I really hope that made sense, and that it's based on the correct reading of your presentation.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by gach »

All the real world systems I've encountered that can count as consonant gradation come historically from phonetically conditioned alternation and underlyingly have very simple rules. It's highly advisable that you first work through the underlying principles and history of the gradation and only then start investigating what kind of paradigms will you get. Otherwise it's all too easy to invent alternation paradigms that don't make sense and aren't internally consistent. Also if you know how the gradation has developed into its present state it'll be easy to see what kind of outcomes certain lenition alternations should have.
sangi39 wrote:If some chains are three stages long while others are four stages, I don't see that being much of a problem. The same thing happens, IIRC, in Finnish and in the example I provided, some chains are four stages long while others are just two stages, because each step represents a shift from a strong grade to a weak grade. In Finnish, for example, /t/ is the weak grade of /tt/ but also the strong grade counterpart of /d/, but (to my knowledge, someone might know better), there aren't (many?) instances of /t/ remaining /t/ where, say, /mp/ shifts to /mm/.
Properly speaking Finnish doesn't even have any three way gradation. All the alternations group in distinct pairs even when they'd seem to form chains. There are no cases where the same root can appear in more than the two grades. In Saami you can find real three way gradation that only affects some consonantisms, such as vaši ("anger.GEN") : vašši ("anger") : vaš'šái ("angry", overlong geminate, the <'> is only used in dictionary orthographies) or oza ("search.IMP") : ohcat ("to search") : ohcci ("searcher"). The basic gradation is the alternation between the strong and weak grade and only some cases allow the overlong grade which comes out of historical extra lengthening before contracted syllables.

For Kišta I have a system where a basic short or neutral grade appears in stressed syllables and alternates with a long grade in open unstressed syllables and a weak grade in (morphophonemically) closed unstressed syllables. Quite often the neutral grade is only identical with either of the long or weak grades or has only an allophonic difference with them. Some patterns are kk:k:h, ss:s:s and ls:ls:ll.

Occasionally further changes muddy the picture quite a bit. Certain Finnish noun declensions have their genitive plural in free variation between -den and -tten: tarinoiden ~ tarinoitten ("story.PL.GEN"). This would seem to have either the weak grade of t:d or the strong grade of tt:t but in actuality the pattern is far removed from any regular gradation and there aren't any cases where you could test how other consonants would behave in the same one off situation.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

gach wrote:All the real world systems I've encountered that can count as consonant gradation come historically from phonetically conditioned alternation and underlyingly have very simple rules. It's highly advisable that you first work through the underlying principles and history of the gradation and only then start investigating what kind of paradigms will you get. Otherwise it's all too easy to invent alternation paradigms that don't make sense and aren't internally consistent. Also if you know how the gradation has developed into its present state it'll be easy to see what kind of outcomes certain lenition alternations should have.
sangi39 wrote:If some chains are three stages long while others are four stages, I don't see that being much of a problem. The same thing happens, IIRC, in Finnish and in the example I provided, some chains are four stages long while others are just two stages, because each step represents a shift from a strong grade to a weak grade. In Finnish, for example, /t/ is the weak grade of /tt/ but also the strong grade counterpart of /d/, but (to my knowledge, someone might know better), there aren't (many?) instances of /t/ remaining /t/ where, say, /mp/ shifts to /mm/.
Properly speaking Finnish doesn't even have any three way gradation. All the alternations group in distinct pairs even when they'd seem to form chains. There are no cases where the same root can appear in more than the two grades. In Saami you can find real three way gradation that only affects some consonantisms, such as vaši ("anger.GEN") : vašši ("anger") : vaš'šái ("angry", overlong geminate, the <'> is only used in dictionary orthographies) or oza ("search.IMP") : ohcat ("to search") : ohcci ("searcher"). The basic gradation is the alternation between the strong and weak grade and only some cases allow the overlong grade which comes out of historical extra lengthening before contracted syllables.

For Kišta I have a system where a basic short or neutral grade appears in stressed syllables and alternates with a long grade in open unstressed syllables and a weak grade in (morphophonemically) closed unstressed syllables. Quite often the neutral grade is only identical with either of the long or weak grades or has only an allophonic difference with them. Some patterns are kk:k:h, ss:s:s and ls:ls:ll.

Occasionally further changes muddy the picture quite a bit. Certain Finnish noun declensions have their genitive plural in free variation between -den and -tten: tarinoiden ~ tarinoitten ("story.PL.GEN"). This would seem to have either the weak grade of t:d or the strong grade of tt:t but in actuality the pattern is far removed from any regular gradation and there aren't any cases where you could test how other consonants would behave in the same one off situation.
I may have been slightly unclear in that, but I was pretty much trying to make the "paired grades" point for Finnish. With that in mind, I bow to your superior presentation [:)]

I've always use "chains" to condense all the pairings down into fewer lines running down the page, but looking at it now, I could see how it could be ambiguous or unclear.

And I'd definitely agree with working out the way gradation/alternation/whatever arose from initial conditions, which is why I threw out the lakki ~ lakkin > lakka ~ ljutSa set of examples [:)]
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

Actually, saying all that, do you even need to initial, phonological condition to disappear for it to be classed as consonant gradation, as long as each sound (or most of them) can occur in both strong and weak grade forms? (geminate plosives seem to be the hardest ones to fit into weak grades, but since they'd contrast with strong grade short plosives, thus potentially forming minimal pairs, they'd still be phonemic).

lakki ~ lakkin > lakin, kk <> k
laki ~ lakin > lagin, k <> g
lagi ~ lagin > lajin, g <> j
laji ~ lajin > lain, j <> 0

The phonologically conditioning environment is still there, but each grade involved one phoneme being substituted for another. Less interesting, though, I admit, but I've been thinking of adding limited consonant gradation to one of the Sirdic languages.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by gach »

sangi39 wrote:Actually, saying all that, do you even need to initial, phonological condition to disappear for it to be classed as consonant gradation, as long as each sound (or most of them) can occur in both strong and weak grade forms?
There's no need for any initial conditions to disappear or the alternation patterns to be even remotely exhaustive. The Central Alaskan Yupik consonant and vowel length alternations have all their conditioning environments still perfectly intact and visible form the surface and the Finnic gradation basically only involves the three stops /p t k/ in various environments. If you want, you can call a fully allophonic alternation gradation if it's just reasonable to organise it into some selection of "grades". There's nothing more mystical about gradation than that and it'd be entirely legitimate to call ablaut vowel gradation if you feel like it.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

gach wrote:
sangi39 wrote:Actually, saying all that, do you even need to initial, phonological condition to disappear for it to be classed as consonant gradation, as long as each sound (or most of them) can occur in both strong and weak grade forms?
There's no need for any initial conditions to disappear or the alternation patterns to be even remotely exhaustive. The Central Alaskan Yupik consonant and vowel length alternations have all their conditioning environments still perfectly intact and visible form the surface and the Finnic gradation basically only involves the three stops /p t k/ in various environments. If you want, you can call a fully allophonic alternation gradation if it's just reasonable to organise it into some selection of "grades". There's nothing more mystical about gradation than that and it'd be entirely legitimate to call ablaut vowel gradation if you feel like it.
Yeah, that was how one linguist, I've forgotten who, described how ablaut systems are at the most basic level, i.e. allophonic alternations that happen to be tied into grammar because the form of the word has changed with the addition or loss of a segment which indicates grammatical information. The example I remember was basically this:

1) appear only in stressed syllables
2) [e @ o] appear as the respectively counterparts of the above vowels in most unstressed syllables
3) The vowel is dropped immediately before the stressed vowel.

So you might have, for example, a root *tir- ("to compete"), which is "stressed" and another root *b@l- ("to kill"), to which you can add the suffixes *-es (a nominaliser, say), which is "unstressed", and *-ik (a plural suffix, used on both nouns and verbs), which is "stressed", and *-en (first person singular ending in the present tense).

Stress can fall only on one vowel per word, and it always falls on the rightmost "stressed" morpheme in that word. If all morphemes are unstressed, then the rightmost morpheme appears as stressed, but does not cause the dropping of the preceding vowel, but does cause it to appear as its unstressed allophone.

*tir-en > ['ti.ren] - I compete
*tir-ik-en > ['triken] - We compete
*tir-es > ['tires] - Competition
*tir-es-ik > [ter'sik] - Competitions

*b@l-en > [b@'lin] - I kill
*b@l-ik-en > ['bliken] - We kill
*b@l-es > [b@'lis] - Murder
*b@l-es-ik > [b@l'sik] - Murders

I thought it was a pretty good starting point for more complex ablaut systems to develop [:)]
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by DesEsseintes »

@sangi: Thanks for taking the time to look at my gradation patterns. [:)] Your comments are very useful. I will try to respond properly soon.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

DesEsseintes wrote:@sangi: Thanks for taking the time to look at my gradation patterns. [:)] Your comments are very useful. I will try to respond properly soon.
I'd definitely advise taking a look at Gach's comments regarding my response. It helps clear a lot of what in my response might look like garbled nonsense [:P]
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Trebor »

gach wrote:
Trebor wrote:If I take the Uralic historical development of consonant gradation as a model and say that this feature arose because of stress on the first, third, fifth, etc. syllables, what rules should I create?
How could short vs. long vowels play a role here?
It's entirely up to you how you decide to build your system and I shouldn't be making the creative decision for you. If you are going for a stress based system, what you want to figure out are the rules for strengthening or weakening of the consonant grades with relation to the location of the consonants to stress bearing syllables. However, if I look at some of your last examples where you have the vowel alternations, it seems that you have in mind some sort of mora preserving changes where making a syllable closed will cause a long vowel to shorten and give you paradigms where short vowels and geminate consonants alternate with long vowels and single consonants.
My goal is to create a naturalistic conlang whose features are attested in the real world, so that's why I prefer to follow your advice more closely than you might be expecting*.

Do the examples I gave above look plausible? Do any Uralic languages act at all similarly?

*Edit: First sentence expanded.
Trebor
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Trebor »

I'm still looking for advice on the above (see previous post). Any ideas, from Gach or others?
Prinsessa
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Prinsessa »

Trebor wrote:
gach wrote:
Trebor wrote:If I take the Uralic historical development of consonant gradation as a model and say that this feature arose because of stress on the first, third, fifth, etc. syllables, what rules should I create?
How could short vs. long vowels play a role here?
It's entirely up to you how you decide to build your system and I shouldn't be making the creative decision for you. If you are going for a stress based system, what you want to figure out are the rules for strengthening or weakening of the consonant grades with relation to the location of the consonants to stress bearing syllables. However, if I look at some of your last examples where you have the vowel alternations, it seems that you have in mind some sort of mora preserving changes where making a syllable closed will cause a long vowel to shorten and give you paradigms where short vowels and geminate consonants alternate with long vowels and single consonants.
My goal is to create a naturalistic conlang whose features are attested in the real world, so that's why I prefer to follow your advice more closely than you might be expecting*.

Do the examples I gave above look plausible? Do any Uralic languages act at all similarly?

*Edit: First sentence expanded.
There's a looong and nice section on Uralic consonant gradation and its historical development in the Wikipedia article on the subject. I've read it all many times. Check it out if you haven't already!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_gradation
Trebor
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Trebor »

Prinsessa wrote:There's a looong and nice section on Uralic consonant gradation and its historical development in the Wikipedia article on the subject. I've read it all many times. Check it out if you haven't already!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_gradation
Thanks for the link. The info on consonant gradation in Uralic is indeed interesting and useful. But unfortunately, the Wikipedia article doesn't address the question I posed: how to incorporate vowel length into the system?
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by shimobaatar »

Trebor wrote:
Prinsessa wrote:There's a looong and nice section on Uralic consonant gradation and its historical development in the Wikipedia article on the subject. I've read it all many times. Check it out if you haven't already!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_gradation
Thanks for the link. The info on consonant gradation in Uralic is indeed interesting and useful. But unfortunately, the Wikipedia article doesn't address the question I posed: how to incorporate vowel length into the system?
Could you perhaps ask the question again, in a more specific way? I'd like to try to help.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by Prinsessa »

Yeah, I don't really see how vowel length ties into that at all. Of course you can have coëxisting consonant gradation and vowel alternations and you don't necessarily even have to explain it.
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by shimobaatar »

Prinsessa wrote:Yeah, I don't really see how vowel length ties into that at all. Of course you can have coëxisting consonant gradation and vowel alternations and you don't necessarily even have to explain it.
[+1]

Spoiler:
I think I've read that /p t k/ > /ː/ sometimes happens in Finnish consonant gradation, but isn't that only when /p t k/ are the second element of a consonant cluster, as in /mp/ > /mː/? And even then, isn't it historically /mp/ > /mb/, and then the /b/ assimilated to the /m/, lengthening it?

The reason I bring this up is because the first time I read about /p t k/ > /ː/ happening, which was a while ago, I assumed it happened intervocalically sometimes, causing a vowel to lengthen. I'm now petty certain this never happens and probably couldn't happen.

Actually (although I'm not quite sure how realistic it is), in a conlang of mine with consonant gradation, /j w ɺ/ <y w r> elide completely, but have an effect on the preceding vowel. For example:

uyo + ṇ → *uyoṇ → üoṇ
iye + ṇ → *iyeṇ → ieṇ
iwe + ṇ → *iweṇ → ıeṇ
uwo + ṇ → *uwoṇ → uoṇ
aru + ṇ → *aruṇ → aauṇ

When the preceding vowel is a back vowel, /j/ fronts it and disappears, but simply disappears when the preceding vowel is a front vowel. Similarly, /w/ backs preceding front vowels, but has no effect on preceding back vowels. /ɺ/ lengthens preceding vowels.

I figure:

[u.jo] > [u.joɴ] > [uj.hoɴ] > [y.hoɴ] > [y.oɴ]
[i.je] > [i.jeɴ] > [ij.heɴ] > [i.heɴ] > [i.eɴ]
[i.we] > [i.weɴ] > [iw.heɴ] > [ɯ.heɴ] > [ɯ.eɴ]
[u.wo] > [u.woɴ] > [uw.hoɴ] > [u.hoɴ] > [u.oɴ]
[ɑ.ɺu] > [ɑ.ɺuɴ] > [ɑɾ.l̥uɴ] > [ɑɹ.huɴ] > [ɑː.uɴ]

If that makes it any more plausible. [:S]
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Re: Polysynthesis and consonant gradation

Post by sangi39 »

I suppose, taking the ablaut post I wrote earlier, if you had something which caused stress to shift within a word and the realisation of vowel length was tied in with stress (i.e. vowel can be long or short when stressed but only short when unstressed) then you could have:

1) Consonant alternations tied into stress and syllable shape, followed by:
2) Vowel alternations conditioned by similar environments, followed by:
3) A spread of consonant alternation to unstressed environments

So say you have /i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:/ and /p t k p: t: k:/ (out of /p t k p: t: k: m n s h r l w j/) and a syllable structure of CV(:)(F) where F can be any of /N s h r l w j/.

So let's say the following changes occur:

/p: t: k:/ > [p t k]
/p t k/ >

When these consonants appear as the onsets of closed, unstressed syllables (except when word initial)

Now let's say that stress is universally penultimate, shifting rightwards through a word with the addition of suffixes add more syllables. The following vowels can exist in the following environments:

A) Open, stressed syllables: /i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:/ > [i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:]
B) Closed, stressed syllables: /i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:/ >
C) Open, unstressed syllables: /i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:/ >
D) Closed, unstressed syllables: /i u e o a i: u: e: o: a:/ >

After this, consonant gradation expands to all environments where the syllable is closed so that followed by:

/ij uj ej oj aj/ > [i: i: e: e: e:]
/iw uw ew ow aw/ > [u: u: o: o: a:]

In both stressed and unstressed environments as well as allophonic lengthening before all instances of nasals.

NP > P:

[hr][/hr]

And I've run out of time to finish this post. Damn it! [:P]
Last edited by sangi39 on 11 Feb 2015 16:00, edited 1 time in total.
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