User talk:Rua/Archives/2014/April

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I removed reportation.. I'm stopping "edit-war"... Fine? Lighthouse01 (talk) 20:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * No, not fine. You can't remove the report, as your behaviour still hasn't improved. The edit summary you gave while removing it is evidence enough for that. Someone else has restored the report. I would advise not to remove it, as that would probably only get you blocked sooner. CodeCat (talk) 20:47, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I didn't removed cause looks like I don't have admin rights. How to stop block? Lighthouse01 (talk) 00:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure if there is a way to stop it. The best way I can think of is to show people that you will no longer do the things that you're being reported for, will no longer be disruptive, make racist remarks or personal attacks on other editors like JorisvS. But that may take some convincing. CodeCat (talk) 01:04, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Appreciate your co-operation. Lighthouse01 (talk) 01:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Need source for claim that Sievers' Law was active when WGG applied
You need a source for this claim. A. Campbell Old English Grammar specifically asserts that Sievers' Law was NOT active at this point, and the /j/ remained as such after a consonant geminated by WGG. Page 164 "After a preceding syllable was made long by West Gmc. consonantal gemination (sec. 407), /j/ appears to have remained consonantal (sec. 353, footnote), and was subject to loss in OE, e.g. *framjan- > *frammjan- > fremman." Sec 353 footnote 5 (page 146) notes that /u/ remains after /ij/ in rīċu (from *rīkijō) but drops after /j/ in words with WGG, e.g. "*kunjō > *kunnjō > Prim. OE *kynnu > cynn" (his example). This is unexplainable if Sievers' Law applied, producing *kunnijō. Benwing (talk) 00:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But it was clearly retained in Old Saxon and Old High German for much longer, and is often written with "e" which suggests a syllabic or maybe diphthongal pronunciation? CodeCat (talk) 01:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think you can read anything into writing e instead of i. Keep in mind that at the time, both e and i in hiatus in Latin words were pronounced /j/, and Latin was clearly the model for spelling these other languages. Note that similar spelling of /j/ as ge- in OE words like geong /jung/ and geoc /jok/, and /juː/ as variously geo or iu. Also, Old Saxon maintained both original /j/ (whether or not WGG applied) and /ij/, and wrote both the same, which suggests that they had merged into a /j/ by historical times. Same thing may have happened in OHG. OE may have gone the other way, with surviving /j/ in e.g. nerian becoming /ij/, if we are to believe spellings like neriġean.
 * Note that if we are to make sense of both cynn and rīċu, we probably have to assume the following changes: (1) Loss of /j/ after long syllables; (2) High-vowel deletion; (3) Loss of /ij/. The alternative is to assume that high-vowel deletion occurred first and that the resulting *kynnj stayed as a single syllable long enough for /(i)j/-deletion to apply (which is conceivable). Benwing (talk) 06:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * In Old Norse, -ij- is normally deleted medially, while -j- survives. I suppose this could be seen the same as the general syncope of medial syllables. But word-finally (after loss of final -a), the opposite happens: it's -ij- that survives while -j- is lost. Note that this is independent of any preceding geminate, as -ggj- loses its -j- all the same word-finally. Maybe something like that could be applied to Old English as well. CodeCat (talk) 12:58, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, in Old English also, final -ij survives and -j is lost. This is simply evidence that these sounds were vocalized after loss of the following vowel, with -ij becoming -ī and -j becoming short -i. Same thing happened in Gothic as well except that /j/ got reinserted based on the other parts of the paradigm, producing a -jiz ending. This also suggests that Sievers' Law was inactive at the time of WGG because otherwise the -j would become -ij and survive when word-final. I think your belief that Sievers' Law must have still been active at WGG comes from applying Old Norse rules to West Germanic, when in reality West Germanic may well have handled medial -(i)j- differently. Benwing (talk) 17:18, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But -j- does survive word-finally after the West Germanic gemination! Maybe it doesn't in Old English, but it does in for example Old High German cunni, rucki, wecki, betti and so on. So how are these explained then? CodeCat (talk) 17:56, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Good question. It's possible this is because high-vowel deletion didn't apply in the same way in OHG. Keep in mind that HVD was a language-specific process. HVD of -i does appear to have worked differently in that it didn't seem to distinguish between short and long syllables. Perhaps it applied before vocalization of final /j/, or perhaps the process of vocalizing final /j/ yielded a long -ī. Or perhaps there was analogy with a retained /j/ in other parts of the paradigm ... medial /(i)j/ appears to have remained quite late in OHG (and has to have remained late in order to have triggered i-umlaut, which occurred very late). In any case I still think if you want to assert that Sievers' Law was active at the time of WGG, you need a source for this esp. when we have a contradicting source ... otherwise you're veering into OR territory. Benwing (talk) 19:43, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Some thoughts on OE ie and y
We seem to tend to support Lass's claim that ie represented /iy/. But I'm a bit skeptical of this, especially since it seems that one source of long īe is literally ī + e in hiatus. I wonder if ie isn't exactly what it appears to be, i.e. a diphthong /ie/, and that the apparent change of ie -> y is really a case where both fell together into a front mid-high sound, something like in most dialects (but possibly  or some centralized sound, e.g., in the parts of West Saxon where /y/ or some similar sound was retained into Middle English.) This sound was presumably somewhat unstable, and tended to be raised to /i/ in Anglian and lowered to /e/ in Kentish (which nicely explains the otherwise hard-to-explain Kentish sound change where /y/ -> /e/ but /i/ is left alone). Looking at my Anglo-Saxon dictionary, I see that very often for a given ie word there's a whole host of variations with various other vowels. You'd have to look closely at this to see whether an explanation like this fits the historical data and what the specifics were in different regions. Do you know of any sources that take this position? Or at least sources that discuss different hypotheses concerning the interpretation of ie? BTW as for the claim that this violates DHH, there's no reason to assume that DHH still applied during historic times. Both ie and io appear to violate DHH, and if io really represents /iu/, why wasn't it just written that way? (Esp. since in fact it was written that way in some of the very early sources from the 8th century, suggesting that there really was a change /iu/ -> /io/.) Thoughts? Benwing (talk) 08:18, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't really know. I'm reminded of a sound change that occurred in late Old Dutch, where /iu/ > /y:/ in most dialects, but /iu/ > /ie/ in some others (primarily Flemish). Modern dialects still preserve the distinction. Is it possible that something similar should be posited for Old English? We know that West Saxon had a stronger tendency towards unrounding than some other dialects, so maybe there was indeed a /iu/ at some point as you say, but it was realised as /iy/ and then: 1. unrounded to /ie/ in West Saxon, and 2. monophthongised to /y:/ in many other dialects. I don't know if this holds for the "short" /ie/ though. Is that ever written as , or is it only the "long" diphthong that alternates with ? CodeCat (talk) 13:09, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
 * /iu/ from Proto-Germanic becomes io and later eo, whereas ie is something different -- other than in certain weird cases it only comes from i-umlaut of ea or io (possible occurrences of eo were largely umlauted to io pre-historically). The equivalent in non-West-Saxon is ea -> ē, io -> io. AFAIK both short and long versions alternate with y. Benwing (talk) 18:17, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But in Proto-Germanic /iu/ only occurred in environments with i-mutation, and /eu/ only occurred in environments without. They were complementary allophones. And as far as I know,  is actually still attested in some early Old English texts? CodeCat (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

another comment
I was looking through your "User contributions" and notice you don't give any edit summaries for the changes to Proto-Balto-Slavic or similar large changes to linguistic articles. It would help me at least if you could indicate in a few words what you did, e.g. "rearrange accent text, delete notation section" for the change I commented about up above.

One other thing ... in Old French I think final schwas were elided before words beginning with a vowel, so in une orange the first schwa would not be pronounced. The same thing happens in other Romance languages, and is the explanation for strange-seeming phenomena like Spanish el alma (feminine) originally *ela alma. As for une orange I think this was actually borrowed from Occitan, which has a word something like auranja, borrowed in turn from Spanish naranja with a combination of wrong division and folk etymology that involved the word aur "gold". Portuguese also borrowed from Spanish and apparently had two rounds of wrong division to get laranja. Another interesting case is the various words for "unicorn", where French le licorne has again two rounds of wrong division, and this was further corrupted in Italian to leocorno by folk etymology involving leone "lion".

Benwing (talk) 00:30, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But the original word did not begin with a vowel, it was norenge. une orenge would not have been homophonous with une norenge at the time, as the latter would have had one syllable extra. CodeCat (talk) 00:34, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, something like this happened, almost surely. Etymonline asserts the same thing, although I seem to have gotten the line of borrowing wrong ... it came through Italian not Spanish. Italian already has arancia so the loss of n happened there. I strongly think norenge is a non-existent form. Benwing (talk) 00:50, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Good on you
Yeah, calling me biased is a-okay, but calling them a cunt for it is a no-no. Let's keep passing Bokmal and Nynorsk and Riksmal and other orthographies off as spoken dialects, because I'm biased, apparently. — lfdder 15:00, 27 April 2014 (UTC)