Talk:Apophony

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Edits
Good work on this article, Ishwar. --Doric Loon 22:58, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Arabic
A couple of months ago, I suggested that some material written by Benwig which had been temporarily lodged at what is now Talk:Indo-European ablaut should be worked into the Apophony article. I don't know enough Arabic to do anything with it, but perhaps, Ishwar, you might look at that and see whether any of it is worth including here. --Doric Loon 23:06, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

move
i suggest that this article be moved to Ablaut as ablaut is the more common term. – ishwar  (speak)  16:39, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I concur; see Talk:Ablaut for extensive discussion. &mdash; mark &#9998; 14:00, 24 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Support --Gareth Hughes 16:55, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Oppose for reasons given at Talk:Ablaut--Doric Loon 20:04, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Oppose: The most inclusive common definition of 'ablaut' is limited to vowel gradation whereas this article is much more inclusive than that, including consonant alternation and tone alternation. Besides it would be confusing if Germanic umlaut were included in the article called 'Ablaut' when it is explicitly excluded from the Indo-European definition of 'ablaut.' I can see that 'Apophony' may not be an ideal title either, but 'Ablaut' is worse. --teb728 06:16, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
 * hi. I think that these are good objections. The information about tonal & consonantal alternation could be moved somewhere else, of course. It is also questionable that we use the term apophony in a more inclusive sense. Anyway, this hasnt been worked out yet, so maybe this Move is a bit hasty (I apologize). Re confusion of Germanic umlaut: this is a confusion that is not our fault. The term umlaut is used in 2 different senses: (1) historical umlaut and (2) synchronic umlaut. This is unfortunate, but an objection to an ablaut-named article because of this is not so convincing. thanks – ishwar  (speak)  06:36, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Support Ablaut is far more common a term than apophony is. Evertype 14:30, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
 * True, but it's not more common than "gradation" - and like TEB728, I would not be against a move - just not to Ablaut. --Doric Loon 14:36, 3 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Oppose Ablaut is primarily the Indo-European phenomenon and, as such, deserves its own article rather than redirecting here. I would not necessarily mind a move to other titles, though. - Haukur 09:28, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

No consensus yet, but progress
To summarise, we have two articles, currently at apophony and Indo-European ablaut, and three talk pages.

The entry currently at ablaut has no significant history... it has always been a redirect somewhere (let's keep it that way). Its talk page could be preserved by cut-and-paste as the talk page history is contained in the signatures. So there's no technical problem with the proposed move.

ISTM that there are many right answers here. We're in an area where there is ongoing research and controversy, and the terminology of various authorities is a suspect (wait for it) various. The example given of ablaut in a non-Indo-European language was only published in 2003. It's exciting to me (as a former linguistics student, SIL Melbourne) that we have a cadre of Wikipedians capable of sustaining these discussions, and interested in doing so. I think that the suggestion above that we need to distinguish current from historical usage is a good observation, but it's not the whole answer, as what is current usage and what historic is itself controversial.

And you all seem well aware of the dangers of straying into original research. I mention that mainly to caution any newcomers to this discussion.

I would however caution that some of the comments in the three talk pages could be seen as personal attacks. Attack the statement, not the person. But I also note that these heated comments seem to have been taken with admirable understanding and a sense of humour. Hang in there!

I look forward to this discussion coming to a consensus, and despite my desire to clean up the backlog of proposed moves, my suggestion is that this remain proposed for a while longer while this consensus is sought. Andrewa 18:20, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

ablaut versus umlaut
Can I just point out that it is not true to say that the distinction between ablaut and umlaut (in the original senses of the words) is ONLY diachronic. I do grant you that the distinction is primarily thought of as diachronic, because it is of fundamental importance for diachronic studies and only has limited usefulness to synchronic studies. But the fact remains that scholars HAVE made a synchronic distinction, and this distinction is useful in the modern languages classroom. Take foot and feet. We know that historically this is vowel harmony - oo gets dragged to ee to harmonize with a suffix which once existed. But the suffix no longer exists, and yet the alternation is systematic. What we see in the modern language is not harmony but fronting. ALL Germanic nouns which form their plurals by vowel alternation do it by fronting: the vowel of the plural is a fronted version of the vowel of the singular. Man-men, German Buch-Bücher, Gott-Götter - they are all moving in the same direction. The same is true of all adjectives forming their comparatives by alternation (hoch-höher), and all weak verbs forming their present stems by alternation (providing you know to take the past tense form as the starting point: bought-buy). However the alternation in Germanic strong verbs does not follow this system: the vowel changes appear to be random. Even if we knew nothing about the history of the forms, we would be able to see from the modern languages that there are two phenomena, and since one of them is regular enough to be useful for language-teaching, the distinction has practical value as well as theoretical interest.--Doric Loon 20:05, 27 November 2005 (UTC)


 * hi. my response is: yes & no. there is a difference in the vowel alternations, and it would be a poor description of Germanic langs if this was not noted. however, the reason that one alternation type is termed umlaut is based on a diachronic perspective. to use the term umlaut to describe a vowel alternation that is morpho-syntactically governed (as opposed to phonologically governed, i.e. synchronic umlaut) is confusing. a more consistent usage of terminology could call this something like fronting-ablaut or some other term. several reference works (on morphology & general linguistics) have pointed out the inconsistent/misleading usage of the traditional term umlaut to refer to ablaut phenomena. perhaps it is useful to continue this practice in language-teaching (i wont comment on this). it is less useful to maintain this usage in a general linguistic context. (e.g., one could imagine a language that had fronting-ablaut and backing-ablaut in addition to other ablaut patterns: we hopefully would want a terminology that could appropriately name these alternations.) peace – ishwar  (speak)  06:00, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Address is a bad example
The stress is, in some dialects, always on the second syllable. This is true in most dialects in England. Avengah (talk) 01:18, 21 March 2011 (UTC)


 * You're right. I've changed it. Duoduoduo (talk) 19:30, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

goose / geese: ablaut or umlaut?
The section on umlaut versus ablaut says "Note that in Indo-European historical linguistics the terms ablaut and umlaut refer to different phenomena and are not interchangeable." The Description section has a table listing goose/geese as an example of apophony, which the lede defines as synonymous with ablaut. But the article on Germanic umlaut, in the section "Morphological effects", says that goose/geese is an example of umlaut, and indeed it would seem to be since it involves fronting.

So should goose/geese be removed from the table? Duoduoduo (talk) 19:30, 2 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Goose/geese is Umlaut. It is not Ablaut. But it IS apophony. This is the reason why it is bad practice to use "ablaut" as a synonym for "apophony". Yes, some linguists do this, when they are not talking about Germanic languages and therefore the resulting confusion is not important to them. But since umlaut and ablaut are different, and both are apophony, it would be very helpful if we could stop using ablaut to mean apophony. --Doric Loon (talk) 14:06, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Terminology
As a newcomer to this field, I wonder why we are calling it "vowel alternation"? It seems merely to be alteration. Moving from sing to sang, the vowel alters, but it only alternates if we (choose to) say sing, sang, sing. What am I missing here? Aboctok (talk) 21:04, 11 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Actually, there's a good article on alternation: Alternation (linguistics). It's all about the alternants. ;) Aboctok (talk) 22:02, 11 September 2012 (UTC)


 * It's fairly standard linguistic terminology. AnonMoos (talk) 12:52, 12 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I suppose the difference is that 'alteration' implies that one form is the norm and the other is derived from it, while 'alternation' suggests an exchange without prejudice to the question of originality. In the case of 'sing' and 'song' it would be difficult to say which was more original in a diachronic analysis (history of the language), and quite impossible to say which is most basic in a synchronic analysis (what's going on in people's heads when they speak). --Doric Loon (talk) 17:01, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Number of languages apophony/ablaut appears in
Does anybody know how many languages this phenomenon appears in? There are examples on the page, but it doesn't give a number. Adjective Recoil (talk) 05:30, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Frankly, I wouldn't even try to pursue a question like that. Indo-European Ablaut is present in pretty-well every Indo-European language, though there may be one somewhere where levelling has eliminated it. And if you take a broader understanding of the apophany, I should think there can hardly be a language in the world that doesn't have it. --Doric Loon (talk) 19:26, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

HTML
The article uses a lot of HTML tags, which is generally seen to be A Bad Thing. See I was about to define a new template to generate bold and underlined text, so it could replace the 64 uses of the  tag. I was going to call it bu, which is simple but dull. I assume that there is a another name that would better describe what it would be used for here. What should the template be called? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 18:42, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, I will go with bu — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:15, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:34, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Alternative terms in first sentence
Per WP:LEADCLUTTER, please trim the list to the most common terms or move the list down. If any of the terms have more specific meanings you could also introduce them separately. Jruderman (talk) 02:12, 5 July 2024 (UTC)


 * They're terms which have accumulated from a number of people with different scholarly backgrounds discussing this phenomenon over several centuries. Ablaut is the most well-known of the alternatives (the German calque of apophony), but I doubt that any of the others should be removed from the article. AnonMoos (talk) 19:18, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * What do you think of moving most of the list down into a new section like "Terminology" or "Synonyms"? Which ones are still used enough to keep the top? Jruderman (talk) 01:37, 8 July 2024 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's an urgent problem, but if the change were made, Ablaut is the one which most clearly should be kept at the top of the article. Maybe also "internal inflection", due to its clear meaning.  I have 5 dictionaries of linguistics on one of the shelves behind my computer, and eventually I may look through them to see which terms are most commonly found there (but I can't promise when that will happen). AnonMoos (talk) 19:10, 15 July 2024 (UTC)