Re: The 'have' of possession

On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:

I don’t have a neat explanation as to why both Russian and Irish have
all the palatalisation you could want, though!

>
In Russian it's clearer because of having, in effect, two sets of
vowels.

But that is only an orthographic convention.  Apart from и/ы, the
vowels are pronounced the same.  The distinction is between palatalized
and unpalatalized/velarized consonants.

The various Slavic languages have different sets of such consonant
pairs, and they might reflect different historical processes (I don't
know), but the languages, such as Russian, with a more extensive
system have developed it through the loss of the yers.  The yers
were two extra-short vowels, one front, one back, and there must
have been allophonic palatalization before the front yer.  Eventually
the yers were lost from all Slavic languages, becoming either full
vowels or dropping out altogether, leaving many places where the
palatalization was now the only distinction, rendering it phonemic.

Romanian is well into developing palatalized consonants, mainly in
word-final position, and the process appears to be allophonic
palatalization before final /i/ (still written) turning phonemic
with the loss of that vowel.

I have no idea how Irish developed its broad/slender distinction,
but a similar process would be my first guess.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de