Re: Preaspiration in Algonquian and Nordic

From: Merlijn De Smit (isolintu_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/01/04 

Date: 1 Dec 2004 11:44:24 -0800

Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au> wrote in message news:<41ABA475.B24@alphalink.com.au>...
> Joseph W. Murphy, the infant linguist (he's just been demoted
> from "boy") wrote:
>
> > According to the book, one of the features of Miami-Illinois ("MI") (and
> > proto-Algonquian too) is preaspiration of obstruents *p, *t, *k, *c [here
> > pronounced "ch" as in "church"], and the sibilants *s, and *s [pronounced
> > "sh" as in "she"], with the indicator for preaspiration being *h.
>
> > I've tried to figure out what a preaspirated obstruent or sibilant sounds
> > like but am not having much luck.
>
> Get yourself some tapes of Scots Gaelic. It's got lots of preaspirated
> stops.
>
> > Any thoughts on how I should pronounce them?
>
> [hp], [ht], [hk] (or even [xk])
>
>
> Look, even [st], as in "ort" (upon thee) which should rightly
> be [orht] but is [orst]
>
> > Secondly, in trying to learn about preaspiration by doing a search for the
> > term on Google, I learned that it is a feature of Icelandic, Scottish
> > Gaelic
>
> C'est bien ce que je disais! J'invente pas, tout de même, voilà:
> PROOF !!! comme dirait l'autre (eh, eh, eh).
>
> > Faeroese and some Swedish dialects and there are theories that such
> > crept into Old Norse from contacts with Saami.
>
> Is it a feature of Saami? If so, how come it has not crept into
> Finnish? How about Estonian?
>
> My guess: it's just one of them true "universals", not "universals"
> as in "Universal Grammar" but as in "you find them everywhere".
> Like (let's cut this down to size) mouse droppings.

It's a feature of most Saami languages. Preaspiration does not seem to
appear at all in Inari Saami (which does have postaspiration instead),
and to a lesser extent in East Saami (Kildin and Ter Saami) than it
does in the West Saami languages: in Kildin and Ter Saami, only
original geminate stops show preaspiration. In South Saami, if I'm not
mistaken, stops are preaspirated only after short vowels.

It hasn't crept into Finnish since preaspiration in Saami is connected
with the historical gemination of consonants before open syllables, a
sound change which didn't occur in Finnic. So PU *käte 'hand' becomes
*keeta in Proto-Saami, *keetta a bit later, and ends up as giehta in
North Saami, whereas Finnish has käsi (käde-n, genitive, käte-nä,
essive).

Lauri Posti has argued that Saami prespiration is in fact a
contact-induced change of Nordic origin (in a Festschrift for Björn
Collinder called "Scandinavica et Fenno-Ugrica" from 1954). A.D.
Kylstra has treated this hypothesis in an article called
"Skandinavisch-Lappische Parallelen" (Memoires de la societe
finno-ugrienne 185, 1983). Anyway, I don't have any references handy
for the hypothesis that it was the other way around: however, there's
a researcher in Berlin called Michael Riessler if I'm not mistaken who
has been working with a lot of putative phonological substratum
phenomena in Central Scandinavian - perhaps also prespiration.

I would probably bet that there are _some_ varieties of both Finnish
and the northern languages on the Saami language border with such a
strong Saami substratum that there may be traces of preaspiration in
them - the Finnish of Nattavaara village for instance in North Sweden
is very strongly influenced by Saami though I do not know about
preaspiration - but not necessarily central scandinavian dialects as a
whole. Definitely not Faroese, I'd gather.

Merlijn de Smit