Talk:Nonconcatenative morphology

images
this is one article where a picture of the different tiers would greatly improve the explanation, i think. peace – ishwar  (speak)  06:42, 8 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Added a pic. AnonMoos 21:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


 * hi. thanks for the visual. (simple is good for beginners). peace – ishwar  (speak)  05:41, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Umlaut
The English alternation "foot ↔ feet" is not really a "remnant of older non-concatenative processes", since feet started out as something like fot-iz (with fully concatenative case-number suffix), the [o] vowel became fronted as a non-phonemic allophone before the [i] vowel in the next in the next syllable, and then became phonemically distinct from [o] when the [i] vowel reduced and was deleted. AnonMoos 00:43, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


 * anonmoos is right. foot => feet is an example of umlaut; ablaut is something different. could someone who knows more than i do change that?

75.117.119.209 (talk) 02:42, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, there's not necessarily any direct contradiction between the modern English "foot" - "feet" alternation being umlaut in terms of 19th-century Indo-Europeanist terminology and also "ablaut" in terms of some versions of general 20th-century linguistic terminology... AnonMoos (talk) 21:21, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * A better example for an IE ablaut (which is inhered from the proto-language) is 'deem - doom' or 'sing - sang'. As far as we know, it was caused by a grammatical rule, in contrast with the i-umlaut in 'foot - feet', which is caused by old phonetic peculiarities that are no longer reminiscent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.187.46 (talk) 12:14, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

While examples are common enough among verbs, I can think of no examples of ablaut affecting noun declensions in English--certainly none that are so-inherited from PIE. That said, there are examples across functional parts of speech such as heat/hot, ride/road, wreak/work, sit/set/seat, etc. Excepting ignorance or a deliberate desire to mislead the ignorant, there is no defense for the argument, even the portions that make sense, that foot-feet is an example of ablaut. It is not, reminiscence notwithstanding, nor is i-umlaut a peculiarity; it is a predictable and regular pattern within early Germanic languages, and to this day in other languages scattered around the world (Rotuman comes immediately to mind)...

That said, umlaut is not necessarily inadmissible as an example of nonconcatenative (a marvelously concatenative word) morphology, it just shouldn't be presented as an example of ablaut. When I use "hice" and "meese", sure I'm making up plurals in imitation of umlaut-derived forms, is that also ablaut? 68.113.225.4 (talk) 02:31, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Umlaut Examples
Possible examples for an Umlaut Section

Umlaut

Main article: Umlaut

When suffixes that contain a front vowel are added to the stem, the vowel in the stem becomes fronted.

This process can be seen in the kin terms in German[1]:

Bruder 'brother' ←→  Brüderlein 'brother-dimin' Frau    'woman'  ←→  Fräulein     'woman-dimin' Phillipvl (talk) 07:03, 2 December 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Phillipvl (talk • contribs) 06:59, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

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Potential addition to articles Mainspace:

Internal stem change can involve the modification of vowels or consonants of the root. This process can occur alone, or in conjunction with affixation. Phillipvl (talk) 07:05, 2 December 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Phillipvl (talk • contribs) 07:00, 2 December 2016 (UTC)