Language and other unrealized hopes
Reading Caelestis's (Caelestis?) account of a PIE conference at MIT, and two things, not memories so much as conjuries of internal representations, come flooding back:
Now, for Historical Phonology, we’re supposed to e-mail questions on the day’s lecture before the following day’s. I couldn’t really come up with anything, except in connection with something that’s not sitting right with me. It seems, in my incomplete understanding, that Stratal Optimality Theory wants to extend recessive verbal accentuation rules to other word-types in Greek. This requires positing a class of deaccented stems. So, /περί-πλό-ου/ → περίπλου, *περιπλόυ ‘sailing around-gen.’, /χαριεντ/ → χάριεν, *χαρίεν ‘with pleasure’; /δύσ-δάμαρτ/ → δύσδαμαρ, *δυσδάμαρ ‘ill-wedded’; /οἰνό-γάλακτ/ → οἰνόγαλα, *οἰνογάλα ‘wine-milk’; /ἄμφω-ὀδόντ/ → ἄμφωδον, *ἀμφῶδον ‘with teeth on both [jaws]’. I have no objection to a deaccented stem-class, which I first saw proposed for Russian. But the examples were funny: χάριεν “as Adv., was written proparox. ... in Att., acc. to Hdn. Gr. 1.350 ... but no example is quoted; neut. as Adj. is proparox. acc. to Suid.” (s.v. χαρίεις, LSJ); I remember compounds having accentuation patterns depending on type, e.g. bahuvrīhis are accented a certain way (details not within mental or manual reach), so the removal of the two lexical pitches and assignment of a new regular pitch strikes as strange. But, then again, Greek is my left hand.
But one is missed much more sorely than the other.
Now, for Historical Phonology, we’re supposed to e-mail questions on the day’s lecture before the following day’s. I couldn’t really come up with anything, except in connection with something that’s not sitting right with me. It seems, in my incomplete understanding, that Stratal Optimality Theory wants to extend recessive verbal accentuation rules to other word-types in Greek. This requires positing a class of deaccented stems. So, /περί-πλό-ου/ → περίπλου, *περιπλόυ ‘sailing around-gen.’, /χαριεντ/ → χάριεν, *χαρίεν ‘with pleasure’; /δύσ-δάμαρτ/ → δύσδαμαρ, *δυσδάμαρ ‘ill-wedded’; /οἰνό-γάλακτ/ → οἰνόγαλα, *οἰνογάλα ‘wine-milk’; /ἄμφω-ὀδόντ/ → ἄμφωδον, *ἀμφῶδον ‘with teeth on both [jaws]’. I have no objection to a deaccented stem-class, which I first saw proposed for Russian. But the examples were funny: χάριεν “as Adv., was written proparox. ... in Att., acc. to Hdn. Gr. 1.350 ... but no example is quoted; neut. as Adj. is proparox. acc. to Suid.” (s.v. χαρίεις, LSJ); I remember compounds having accentuation patterns depending on type, e.g. bahuvrīhis are accented a certain way (details not within mental or manual reach), so the removal of the two lexical pitches and assignment of a new regular pitch strikes as strange. But, then again, Greek is my left hand.
But one is missed much more sorely than the other.