Re: -eme and related suffixes

Joachim Pense wrote:
>
> Helmut Richter:
>
> >
> > Is something a word if there are no occurences of it other than in
> > articles constructing minimal pairs? Please show me any occurence of
> > "Tauchen" (little rope) or "Vauchen" (little letter V) in any other text.
> > "Frauchen" (female owner of pet) does exist but and is, to my knowledge,
> > the only German word where the diminutive suffix -chen is appended to a
> > word ending with -a, -o, -au, or -u without causing an umlaut. Normally,
> > it is not appended at all to words ending with a vowel other than Schwa
> > (which then is lost).
>
> In earlier times, the -chen would have triggered umlauting the vowel of the
> preceding syllable. But this rule is not productive anymore (although I
> think it is not _totally_ gone yet). So, any neologisms of more recent
> times ("Frauchen") or ad-hoc constructions ("Vauchen") will indeed have the
> [c] after a back vowel, because the morpheme .chen seems to be evaluated
> (including the "ch") before the whole word is produced.

So you have proved by your own statement that /x/ and /ç/ are different
phonemes.

> So, to me the question remains how a phoneme starting with "ch" could come
> into existence in the first place.

Excuse me? What does "phoneme starting with 'ch'" mean?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

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