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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: The signs of palaticization, etc.
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Date: Thu, 26 Jun 1997 16:30:55 GMT
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In article <33b69a16.362182342@news.clark.net>,
Harlan Messinger <gusty@clark.net@remove.this.part.before.sending> wrote:
>deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) wrote:
>
>
>>This is a bit more useful.  As another poster stated, Irish /x/ (spelled
>><ch> in Irish) is usually transcribed <gh> in anglicisations; this leaves
>><ch> free to represent palatalised ('slender') /t/.
>>-- 
>
>I was wondering: what factors have caused specific letters in
>different languages to specific phonemic relationships? In English,
>"h" serves a specific purpose, almost uniform, in "sh", "ch" and "th".
>It plays a similar role in Irish.  (It serves a different role in
>transliterations of languages with paired  aspirated and unaspirated
>consonants). 

As far as Irish goes, it was my impression that the traditional spelling
of this sort of lenition (e.g. /t/ -> /h/, /k/ -> /x/, etc.) was a
superior dot over the appropriate stop; the digraphs represented an
English-influenced transcription, thus the similarity.  I'll have to look
this one up.

>Italian represents with a "g" before "l" and "n" what
>Portuguese represents with an "h" AFTER these two letters, while
>Spanish just doubled the letters (and ultimately put one "n" on top of
>the other, giving birth to the tilde). 

In both cases, the sounds have multiple origins and one etymological
spelling has been generalised.  For example, in Spanish, Latin geminate
/l/ and /n/ were both reduced and palatalised; therefore, it's natural
that the doubled letters should be generalised to cases with a different
origin (e.g. Castella, llano; Catalu~na, ba~no).  In Catalan, the digraph
<yl> (e.g. <uyl> "eye" <- Vulgar Latin *oc'lu) competed with <ll> for a
tiem, but ultimately lost out; however, <ny> (from <ni> + vowel?) won out
over <~n>.  In Italian, the geminate pairs remained geminate, so other
etymological spellings had to be generalised (e.g. <gn>, as in <stagno>
(Latin STAGNUM; cf. Cat. <estany>).

>After the voiced stops of
>ancient Greek became fricatives (beta, gamma, delta), Modern Greek
>went and put nasals before the corresponding voiceless stops to
>replace them. 

Again, this is a case of generalisation of an etymological spelling.
Historical medial /mp/ was lenited to /mb/.  So when a grapheme was needed 
for [b] in borrowed words (e.g. /bira/), <mp> was generalised to initial
position (where, presumably, Greek phonotactics prevent stop + stop
clusters).

>In both of Japanese's kana, a small version of the
>syllable "tsu" is used to represent a doubled consonant value.

Another generalisation, wouldn't you say?  I wonder if the geminates
weren't all originally written with doubled kana until someone came up
with the more elegent solution of using <tu> as a diacritic.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
