Showing papers in "Language in 1960"

The Phonemes of Bengali

Abstract: 0. This study1 presents a summary of the phonological structure of the Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB) of the educated people of Calcutta. It offers neither a mass of detailed data nor startling innovations of theory, but is intended to provide basic explanation for someone who wants to know the facts about the phonology of the language. There are astonishingly few straightforward descriptions of the phonologies of the various modern languages of South Asia, and this attempts to fill that need for one of them. Bengali is one of the major Indic (or Indo-Aryan) languages of South Asia; in number of speakers and general importance it is second only to Hindi-Urdu, and in quality and quantity of literary production it is second to none. It is spoken by over seventy million people, somewhat more than half of them in East Pakistan and the remainder in West Bengal, India. There is a standard literary form of the language, the sadhu bhasa, quite diverse regional dialects, and a Standard Colloquial, the calit bhdsa, which is described here.la Bengali is customarily written in a special alphabet of the Devanagari type, the Bengali alphabet.lb Apart from sections in various grammars and historical studies, only three systematic synchronic treatments of Bengali phonology are known to us: Chatterji's Sketch,2 Abdul Hai's master's thesis,3 and the senior author's doctoral dissertation.4 Of these, the Chatterji Sketch, a pioneering study in descriptive

The Place of Intonation in a Generative Grammar of English

Abstract: 1 Syntactic structures (1957), the Third Texas Conference on English (1958), and the Fourth Texas Conference on English (1959). 2 Manual of phonology (1955). 3 In symbolizing intonation morphemes I use the following conventions: 0 means any pitch phoneme, /1 2 3 4/. A plus sign means the last digit or any higher digit; e.g. 001+1 means /001/, /0021/, /0031/, or /0041/. A minus sign means the last digit or any lower digit.

String Constituent Analysis

Abstract: Immediate constituent analysis is based on an implicit assumption that linguistic structures-especially syntactic structures-are LAYERED structures amenable to analysis by progressive dichotomous cutting. This paper suggests an alternative assumption, viz., that some linguistic structures are layered while others are ordered like beads on a string. Negatively this alternative assumption leads to a rejection of conventional immediate constituent analysis along with its reluctance to recognize more than two constituents on the same level of cutting.l Positively, it leads to the development of a string constituent analysis in which grammatical strings are discovered and described (with mention of any observable layering characteristics), and in which constituent substitution points within the strings are likewise discovered and described. It is important to note that, while string constituent analysis is not geared to the assumption of the relevance of layering at all points in the structure of a language, it does not rule out the observation and description of layering where this is relevant.

Paradigmatic Resistance to Sound Change: The Old Spanish Preterite Forms vide, vido against the Background of the Recession of Primary -d-

Abstract: It is a truism of diachronic linguistic theory that most historically transparent forms are explainable as compromises between sound shifts (the norm) and a wide range of analogical adjustments (the deviation from the norm). In practice, however, scholars have so far made only modest advances in their attempts at analyzing associative interferences with predictable linguistic change. Specifically, if numerous examples have been collected, often at random, of the extension or complete generalization of an inflectional or derivational morph (say, the marker of a number, a gender, or an agent), little has been ascertained, at least in the Romance domain, on the opposite phenomenon, the preservation of a close-knit paradigmatic pattern at the heavy cost of a break in the consistency of a sound correspondence. Though Sapir, and possibly others before him, eloquently outlined the problem of morphological resistance to a sound shift (Language 196-204, ed. 1921), the precise exemplification and even the technique of analysis remain to be provided on the Romance side-a side credited with controlling a particularly suitable portion of experimental data. The present article is meant to mark just one step, long overdue, in this direction. The exact testing of a seductively brilliant hypothesis such as Sapir's is rarely an easy undertaking. The Romance scholar, in particular, feels obliged not only to array a sizable volume of raw data, but also to appraise earlier explanations or admissions of doubt and ignorance so as to measure the actual advance made possible by the new alternative. The potential reward, aside from the fresh methodological insights, may be dual, as in the present study, where, on the morphological plane, the preterite forms vide 'I saw' and vido 'he saw', a crux of the Old Spanish verbal paradigm, and on the phonological plane, the illdefined development of Lat. -Din Ibero-Romance, are equally at stake.

Statistics, Indo-European, and Taxonomy

Abstract: 1. Setting of the problem. When in 1937 Douglas Chretien and I published Quantitative Classification of Indo-European Languages (Lg. 13.83-105) it aroused a little flurry of attention but no follow-up, except an extension of the method by ourselves to include Hittite (Lg. 15.69-71 [1939]). For some years I had looked on our essay as a dead limb of effort, especially since my coauthor came subsequently to doubt the fruitfulness of the method on the ground that most of the values found by us lacked statistical significance. 2. EllegArd's new coefficient rn. Now Ellegard (Lg. 35.131-56 [1959]) reopens the problem, reviews its history, proposes a simplified technique, and reapplies it to our data and to those of Ross (see ?2.2). He first proposes a new coefficient ro in which all d values (double absences, negative agreements) of the four-cell tables are put at zero. This however he then abandons by putting d = infinity. With this, the r formula reduces to a coefficient rn = a/V/(a + b)(a + c). This is always positive, varying from 0 to 1, with implication of genetic relationship ranging from none to close. It has the intelligible meaning that 'the values of a, b, and c stand for all features which are positively recorded in one or both of the languages, while d, put at infinity, stands for the infinity of features which might conceivably occur in a human language, but do not in the two under consideration' (141). He calls this rn the coefficient of similarity, whereas the r (Q6) used by Kroeber-Chretien is really a coefficient of interdependence, or, as Chrdtien had suggested, of interinfluence. 2.1. Rn is old G. What Ellegard seems not to have noted, or does not mention, is that his rn is the same as a measure G which H. Driver and Kroeber had used in 1932 in measuring cultural (ethnographic) relationship. In this G, a is number of traits shared by two populations, b and c the number peculiar to each of them.1 Except when b and c happen to be equal, a/(a + b) differs from a/(a + c), and a symmetrical value for tabulating must be obtained by averaging the two figures: we used A to denote the arithmetical mean, G the geometrical. While we referred to A and G in the IE essay, we did not work out their coefficients for the languages. Elleg&rd does so, for rn = G, in his table 12. With the situation which we examined in 1937, it does not matter much whether one uses a three-cell or a four-cell coefficient, nor whether it is Qe (r) or Q2 or W [(a + d)/(a + b + c + d)] or A or G, or the absolute value of the a's, or that of b plus c in reverse (103): the relative ranking of pairs of languages remains much the same. This is due to several causes. The languages examined

Greek ou and Armenian oc

Abstract: In his Notes on Vedic noun-inflexion 31 (1942), F. B. J. Kuiper has recognized in Vedic iyu, Av. ayu 'life, age' a Proto-Indo-European *A6yu parallel in structure to the *d6ru, *g6nu, and *s6nu of Skt. daru, Gk. doru 'wood', Skt. janu, Gk. gonu 'knee', and Skt. sanu 'back'. The initial laryngeal has disappeared without trace in Indo-Iranian, even in the oblique cases (e.g. Avestan gen. yao? from *Ayews), but is indicated by cognates in European languages: Gk. aion 'life, age', aiwei, aiEn, aies, etc. 'always', and Lat. aevus, aevum 'age, eternity', all pointing to *Aeyw-, with a vocalism comparable to that of Welsh derw 'oaks' and Ru. d6revo 'tree'. Indecisive in this respect are Germanic cognates such as Gothic aiws* 'age, eternity' and ajukdujs* 'eternity'. Celtic forms such as W oes 'age, lifetime', oed 'age' and OIr. ais 'age; people' seem to lack *w and are not certainly cognate with the family of Skt. dyu and Lat. aevum (cf. Pedersen, VKG 1.176, Walde-Pokorny 1.7, Pokorny IEW 11, and Vendryes, Lexique gtymologique de l'irlandais ancien, A 21). None of the etymologies so far proposed for Gk. ou 'not' merit serious consideration (cf. Boisacq s.v. and Schwyzer-Debrunner, Griech. Gram. 2.591 fn. 5). Clear is only that the prevocalic form ouk is elided from ouki, which contains the neuter indefinite pronoun *kwid 'anything, at all' (Skt. cid).l Ouki, which in classic Greek is limited to the Homeric formula e kal ouki and a couple of other occurrences in the Iliad (cf. Monro, Homeric grammar2 322), must once have occurred freely as a synonym of ou; this is shown both by the mechanical alternation of ouk and ou, and by the apparent free interchange of Myc. o-u-kite-mi KN V 280.5 and o-u-te-mi ibid. 11, 12, 13, 14. Whatever -te-mi may be, o-uand o-u-kiare almost certainly ou and ouki 'not'. I suggest that Gk. ou is cognate with Skt. 6yu and Av. ayu and represents the Greek outcome of PIE *A6yu 'life, lifetime, age, eternity'. The phonetics cause no difficulty; *y is regularly lost between vowels, and the absence of an uncontracted *ou is no more surprising than the absence of an uncontracted *es 'thou art' corresponding to Skt. dsi. The semantic development I envisage is the same as that of the North Germanic negative OIc. eigi, ONorw. eighi, OSw. eghi, ei, etc. 'not'. As is well known,2 eigi etc. consists of ei, ey 'ever, always' (: Go. aiw, OE a, OHG eo, io) plus an enclitic -gi which once meant 'any, at all' (cf. hverrgi 'each one, whoever', hvargi 'everywhere, wherever'; -gi may well go back to the stem *kwi. of Gk. -ki and Skt. cid), but which in eigi simply serves to distinguish the word from

The structure of Maltese: A study in mixed grammar and vocabulary.

Abstract: Maltese is a separate language resulting from the interaction and fusion of North-African Arabic Siculo-Italian, covering two different cultural strata. The Arabic element in Maltese very often corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon in English, while the Romance loans correspond to the Norman-French element. Also as in English, the primitive linguistic stratum is confined mainly to the description of the obvious facts of Nature and the Individual's reactions to them while the abstract and progressive vocabulary of the intelligentsia belongs to later times. The result of this fusion is a mixed grammar and vocabulary as we shall show when studying the structure of spoken Maltese. In order to be able to distinguish the two elements, we have established a series of descriptive criteria that together make possible a detailed phonological analysis of the language. The thesis begins with a description of Maltese sounds, followed by Phonology, where these criteria are based on a study of the Vowels, their quantity, position and sequences; the semi vowel, the diphthongs, their position, stress, the consonants, their sequences including initial groups in phonological junction (zero vowel). In Morphology the words are studied as patterns, with particular attention to the formal arrangement of the consonants and the correlative vowels which are described in their various semantic changes with lists of examples from spoken and archaic Maltese. In both parts the two elements have been treated separately but under Semitic Maltese are treated those words which have been assimilated partially or completely to a Semitic pattern. Words which have not been so assimilated are of course treated under the head of Romance Maltese.

The Value of Phonetic Statements

Abstract: It is odd that linguists, who pride themselves on the rigor and scientific nature of many of their concepts, should nevertheless be so tolerant of vague, unverified statements in some parts of their field. To take an example, Bloch has made many contributions to linguistic theory in a long series of excellent publications,1 but he does not appear to have adopted any scientific procedure to check the validity of the phonetic statements (e.g. those about tongue positions during vowel sounds) which often occur in these works. It seems as if he regards the justification of phonetic statements as outside his field as a linguist. Thus he says,2 'Qualities are identified by ear; but in linguistic works they are traditionally defined in terms of their assumed production by the vocal organs.' This uncritical acceptance of the traditional descriptive techniques is, as we shall show, inadvisable. Disclaimers such as 'articulatory terminology is used only because a usable auditory terminology has not yet been developed' (loc.cit.) are not sufficient excuses for making seemingly dogmatic assertions about physiological facts. When Bloch states (loc.cit.) that [a] in the Japanese word [ha-ko-bu] 'carries' is to be interpreted as 'low back (slightly advanced towards central position)', there is no description of any rigorous experimental procedure used in establishing this 'fact'; nor is there a reference to previous work on which the statement might be based. In any case, even if the terminology is regarded as specifying simply auditory qualities, there is no published evidence indicating that a description of this kind is actually meaningful-i.e. capable of interpretation by other linguists who are also trained phoneticians. Bloch is, of course, not alone in making statements of this form. The great majority of linguists (including the present author) constantly use loose unverified descriptions in all their work; and most linguists would agree with Joos, who, on their behalf, says:3 'We have no quarrel with [Bloch's procedure in this respect]. We all do that, and shall continue to do it no matter how convinced we may yet be that it is unjustified.' But we should note that this traditional cavalier treatment of physiological facts largely accounts for the difficulties which our colleagues in the experimental sciences have in recognising us as fellow scientists. Furthermore, it seems probable that our lack of knowledge of what we are doing when we make phonetic descriptions is actually hampering our own work as descriptive linguists. We need valid phonetic descriptions for two principal reasons. First, a linguist cannot give a comprehensive account of the phonology of a language unless he knows all the phonetic facts; if the original observations made in the field are inadequate, the subsequent analysis is liable to be faulty. Secondly, a linguist

Arabic Evidence for Proto-Semitic */awa/ and */o/

Abstract: The Proto-Semitic vowels, as usually reconstructed, are identical with those of Classical Arabic: short */i a u/, long /*1 a u/ii. In addition, a number of the long vowels are recognized, on the basis of morphophonemic alternation, as resulting from earlier sequences of short vowels and */y/ or */w/.l For example, on the basis of the cognate set Heb. /dan/, Ace. /danu/, Syr. /dan/, Arab. /dana/ 'he judged', Gray2 reconstructs Proto-Semitic */dana/. Since this longvowel correspondence contrasts, however, with that of the set Heb. /ialos/, Ace. /salasu/, Syr. /tala8/, Arab. /0ala(un/, Eth. /salas/ 'three', where he also reconstructs an */-a-/, he posits a presumably pre-Proto-Semitic */aya/ for the first set on the basis of the imperfects Heb. /yain/, Ace. / idin/, Syr. /nain/, and Arab. /yadinu/. The methodological error here is immediately apparent: if the long vowel of */dana/ contrasts in its reflexes in the descendent languages with the long vowel of */0alaiu/, then the contrast existed in Proto-Semitic, and the morphophonemic alternation is irrelevant in determining it. A similar situation exists with respect to the verb Heb. /qam/, Syr. /qam/, Arab. /qama/, Eth. /qoma/ 'he stood' (for the Ace. reflex cf. Ace. /kanu/ 'he existed', Arab. /kana/ 'he was'), where Gray reconstructs */qama/.3 To explain the Heb. reflexes one has to resort to an analogical formation from the forms with suffixes (/danta/ 'you judged', /qamta/ 'you stood') where the vowel remained short, with subsequent stress lengthening of the reestablished short vowel in the simple forms. For Eth. one must recognize an */aw/ nucleus in the suffixed forms which went to /o/ and was reestablished in the simple form. It is much easier, however, to recognize that */aya/ and */awa/ existed in Proto-Semitic.4 Neither Classical Arabic nor any of the modern dialects used as evidence for previous statements give any support to this view, since */aya/, */awa/ and */a/ all fell together in these dialects as /a/ or developments therefrom. But there is one group of Arabic dialects, those of Central Asia,5 that do support this

Gothic iddja and Old English eode

Abstract: [Go. iddja and OE eode 'went' continue a pre-Germanic perfect to the root *ey 'go', whose earliest shape was sg. *edye (?6), pi. *eiynt (?16), and which became PGmc. *e6 (?14), *ijjun (?17). In the singular *e6did not contract (?7-13); this rule partly accounts for OHG ier 'plowed' (?11), and permits us to explain Gmc. et 'ate' as a replacement of *eat from *edde (??12-3, ?21). The development of *-bye to *-6 agrees with that of *-aye to *-o in presents of the second weak class (?14). The -jjof *ijjun is regular from *-iy(?17). Go. iddja, iddjedun has been remodeled from *X-a, *iddj-un (?19), and OE eode, eodon contains the suffix of the weak preterit added to the singular, PGmc. *eo, WGmc. *eu (?20).]