Re: Somewheres

On 2024-09-02, Peter Moylan wrote:

Crossposted to sci.lang, where people might know the answer.
>
Is there a natural tendency for languages to lose final syllables or
final consonants? This thread has provided examples in Spanish. French
lost a lot of final consonants (in speech, but not in writing) centuries
ago. Some southern Italian dialects have dropped a few final vowels, but
this does not extend to northern dialects or the mainstream version of
the language. Portuguese seems to drop all sorts of things.
>
Those are all examples in Romance languages. I can't think of any
examples in Germanic languages, and I don't know enough about other
language families.
>
The well-known example in English is the "dropped g", which reduces an
-ing ending to -@n. But that's not actually the dropping of a consonant,
it's the replacement of one consonant by another. The average English
speaker doesn't notice that, because we're not used to thinking of "ng"
as a single consonant.

The -ing suffix in Modern English is a fusion of two Old English
suffixes, one similar to German -ung & the other to German -end. I'm
not sure of the extent to which that encouraged the development of the
current -in'/-ing situation.



--
With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy,
and bad taste gained ascendancy.                ---Ignatius J Reilly