Re: Somewheres

On Mon, 2 Sep 2024 19:26:42 +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-09-02, Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> wrote:
>

Is there a natural tendency for languages to lose final syllables or
final consonants?

>
If you take the big picture view, the answer is certainly yes, but
the details vary wildly.
>

I can't think of any examples in Germanic languages,

>
Take PGmc *hringaz > OE hring > PDE ring.
>
Proto-Germanic *-az was the counterpart to the ubiquitous Latin
ending -us, Greek -os, but it was mostly lost in West Germanic.[1]
Much later, along the way from Old English [hrɪŋɡ] to Present Day
English [rɪŋ], final [g] after [ŋ] was lost.

More recently, lots of final /r/s have been lost in some dialects
of English, except before a vowel in the next word--a similar pattern
to what happened in French, but it may not continue the same way.
Loss of the final consonant in "of" is much more widespread, and
I'm not going to claim I always pronounce the first [t] in "first step"
or the [d] in "second-best".

Strikingly, Middle English lost final -e and, inconsistenly, -en,
which is intimately tied to the collapse of the declension system.

And lots of the conjugation system?

and I don't know enough about other language families.

[Spanish]

The debuccalization of post-vocalic [s] > [h] isn't limited to final
position, though: mismo [mihmo].

Mostly final position in the syllable, though.  As I mentioned,
northern New Mexico is an exception, and there may be others I
don't know of.
--
Jerry Friedman