Morphologically Conditioned Sound Change?!?
There has been a relatively long and deep consensus (excusing certain malcontents like Yakov Malkiel) that sound changes are never morphologically conditioned. If a sound change appears only in a certain morphological environment, there must have been some phonological conditioning factor there at the time the sound change took place, even if we can't see it now. Knowing this, I'm a bit troubled by something I discovered today. I was comparing data from a language I just did some elicitation on (Sorbung, a previously undocumented Tibeto-Burman language of Manipur, India) and Moyon Naga (which appears to be more closely related to Sorbung than any of the other languages I've looked at). These languages both have lexical prefixes (usually with no transparent function) associated with noun and verb roots. In nouns, we find the following correspondence:
| Gloss | Moyon | Sorbung |
|---|---|---|
| chin | bʌkhá | məkhá |
| forehead | bʌcʌ́r | məcéj |
| heart | bʌrúŋ | məluŋ |
| forehead | bʌtór | mətó |
| nail | bʌtı́ŋ | mətín |
| tongue | bʌrı́ | məlěj |
| Gloss | Moyon | Sorbung |
|---|---|---|
| cough | ŋkhów | məkhá |
| itch | nthʌ́k | məthə̀k |
| kiss | njúp | məjúp |
| laugh/smile | nnə́ | mənʉ |
| lick | nrı́ʔ | məlék |
| yawm | ŋhám | mə́hàm |
I think I might have an answer. If anyone's interested, I'll share it later.
posted by David Mortensen @ 10:49 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
if the language ever had stress it could differentially affect stressed [m@] in nouns and unstressed [m@] in verbs.
Or if it had verb prefixes, these could reduce [m@] to [m].
And while sound changes don't recognize morphology, analogy does, and an [n] prefix on some verbs for some phonetic reason could spread to others that had [m] because of a different environment.
-- entangledbank (http://www.livejournal.com/users/entangledbank)
This is quite true. However, in related languages which preserve theses prefixes, the stress pattern is exactly the same. In brief, feet are iambic and stress preferentially falls on heavy syllables. The roots are heavy syllables and prefixes are light syllables, in both nouns and verbs. So which I do think there was a phonological conditioning factor here, I don't think it was stress specifically.
I should have made clear, in my previous comment, that I was talking about your stress solution only. As for your proposal that the difference between the two cases was an additional prefix, I think that this is quite right, though I think that the prefix may have been in the nouns, rather than the verbs (based on other evidence, which I didn't make available in the post).
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