Continuing to look through Michael Weiss’s Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B (see yesterday’s post), I was struck by a word in this passage:
In Classical Tocharian B ä and a, on the one hand, and a and ā, on the other, are in an alternation governed by the position of the stress. These rules are not yet in place in the archaic texts. In general, disyllabic words have initial stress and tri- and more syllabic words have stress on the second syllable from the left edge of the word, so-called peninitial stress. In tonic position ä becomes a and in atonic position ā become[s] a.
Who was so-called peninitial stress so called by? Not me, I didn’t remember ever encountering the word (though it turns out it occurs in a passage quoted by DM here); while I can see the rationale for it (if stress on the next-to-last syllable is penultimate, why can’t stress on the syllable after the first be peninitial?), I don’t like the word — it looks too much like penitential. It’s not in the OED, but there’s a Wiktionary page which says it’s “(chiefly linguistics),” and a Google Books search confirmed that. But I was a grad student in linguistics; why didn’t I know the word? Judging from the Google Books hits, it seems to have gotten going in the 1980s, just after I had gotten gone from the field. Are Hatters familiar with it?
I’m not sure what “peninitial stress” conveys that “second-syllable stress” wouldn’t convey. Since we conventionally count syllables from the beginning, being able to specify e.g. “penultimate stress” is useful because which syllable is the penultimate one will vary in a count from the beginning. I don’t see a parallel usefulness here, before even getting into the ease of confusion with “penitential.”
Was it imported from some other language where the equivalent of “second syllable” is significantly more unwieldy?
I’m not sure what “peninitial stress” conveys that “second-syllable stress” wouldn’t convey.
That was my thought as well.
And postpeninitial too, why not.
Let me be the third or possibly fourth or fifth to support using ordinal numbers for this purpose.
By the way, are one-first and two-second considered official examples of suppletion?
This is pen- as in English peninsula < Latin paeninsula 'peninsula' = Latin paen[e] 'almost, barely' + insula 'island'. Likewise seen in English penultimate.
(Yes, I at first misread the title as Penitential.)
Latin paen[e] ‘almost, barely’
What’s with this “left edge”? I know we have no Tocharian speakers, only writing, and it’s left to right. Never the less, I’d expect a Linguist to be thinking of the sound pattern/syllable structure. Is the “left edge” in writing not the start of the first syllable? Ah, maybe not, this from AI overview, quoting (possibly) The phonology of Tocharian (paywalled):
Then do we count a CCVC cluster as two-syllable/the V as peninitial?
2010 The Tocharian Verbal System, M. Malzahn has a great deal more in Chapter One Sound Laws. Above my pay-grade, but that also uses ‘from the left’ [page 3].
@AntC: Let the right-to-left jihadists attack the Chomskyans for promoting the unexamined metaphor that human speech proceeds left to right! (I know there are supposed to be languages that don’t adopt the metaphor that the past is situated behind us and the future in front of us …)
By the way, are one-first and two-second considered official examples of suppletion?
Garden variety official suppletion.
I think peninitial is so rare because peninitial stress as a rule is so rare, very much unlike initial, final, penultimate or even antepenultimate stress.
A bizarre convention (together with “right edge”) that seems to be associated with people of certain theoretical backgrounds, but I’m not sure which ones. (I’ve seen it in German, too: rechter Wortrand.) It adds nothing compared to “beginning” and “end”; it just makes its users look (!) like they think of language entirely in visual terms.
So is the relevant syllable the peninit.
Left/right for beginning/end are pretty universal among theoretical phonologists and syntacticians of every denomination. I don’t know that anyone uses any alternatives to left/right dislocation.
I think peninitial is so rare because peninitial stress as a rule is so rare.
That’s why I made up “postpeninitial”. Last I heard, only one language (Hocąk) is known to have such a default stress.
I know there are supposed to be languages that don’t adopt the metaphor that the past is situated behind us and the future in front of us …)
English: “before” and “after” …
Latin “ante” and “post” …
Kusaal has an odd split: nya’aŋ “back, behind” is usual for temporal “after”, but tuon “(in) front” is not used for “before.”
Same in Mooré, I think: poorẽ “behind” can mean “after”, but tàooré “in front” is not used for temporal “before.”
Strange, now I think of it. The usual way to say “before” in Kusaal is to say “when not yet …”, as in e.g.
Abraham da nan kae saŋsi’a la, ka man pʋn bɛ.
Abraham TENSE still not.exist time.certain the and I already exist
“Before Abraham existed, I already existed.”
I suppose it might be connected with the fact that Kusaal expresses the future with the irrealis mood, not the indicative: the future is not just displaced in time, it doesn’t actually exist (yet.) Reasonable enough, when you think about it …
But then, English also has no future …
Re “every denomination”: some quick poking around in the google books corpus confirmed my hunch that “right dislocation” and “left dislocation,” when used to describe syntax rather than injuries to the human body, pop up quite suddenly in the literature in the mid-1970’s, at a time when even those who were not card-carrying Chomskyans were always swimming-if-not-drowning in an ocean of Chomskyan jargon and in many cases unable to avoid swallowing it.
I’m not suggesting that non-Chomskyans were somehow honor-bound to make up their own rival jargon-labels for what we may charitably suppose to be real phenomena in need of a real explanation, but still.
“Beginning” and “end” as markers of direction do not work very well. “Toward the beginning” and “toward the end” have too many syllables. As it happens “forward” and “backward” are confusing. People do disagree as to which way, beginning or end, is “forward”. At least that’s what I’ve heard as an explanation for this “left” and “right” shifts.
Consider left- and right-dislocation a charming residue of a benighted science, just as chemistry nowadays has nothing to do with transmuting metals or whatever.
English also has no future
fun dayne lipn…, vi azoy zogt di geyoynem!
Zogt, not zogn?
ha! indeed it is – and i can even retrace where my misstep came from! i typed “vi azoy”, thought “zarathustra”, and typed “zogt”. shakes fist at poor cousin fred
@DM A bizarre convention … certain theoretical backgrounds, but I’m not sure which ones. (I’ve seen it in German, too: rechter Wortrand.)
I’d say that 2010 Malzahn* I mentioned is more German-with-English words**. Long passages cited in German, without translation ***.
Perhaps the “theoretical backgrounds” are Tocharian Studies?
* sic. Melanie, Univ Vienna. Seems to be variously spelt Melzahn.
** find spot seems to be an archaeological site where documents were discovered.
*** A particularly gnarly subjunctive, with inverted constituent order that defeated my schoolboy German.
So I think this is saying older Tocharian featured regular peninitial syllable accent, which later got corrupted by weakening/deletion of the left-edge/initial (unstressed) syllable.
So I think this is saying older Tocharian featured regular peninitial syllable accent, which later got corrupted by weakening/deletion of the left-edge/initial (unstressed) syllable.
Your understanding is correct.
FWIW the categorization of a certain class of words as ‘wh-words’ has been criticized when we’re talking about languages other than English, and one can understand why. As for ‘left’ and ‘right’, the W3C (founded by Tim Berners-Lee, overseas web standards) has striven to replace their earlier usage of ‘left’ and ‘right’ *where it interacts with writing systems* with ‘start’ and ‘end’ to account for LTR (Latin) and RTL writing systems (Arabic) in a manner that suits the need of both.
oops although ‘overseas web standards’ mmmh maybe…
Once I understood “peninitial” as a contrast to “penultimate”, it made immediate sense to me. It clearly specifies a rule in a way that “second-syllable stress” does not (at least at first glance). It is certainly more useful than having to say “stress on the second syllable from the left edge of the word”, which is ridiculous.
Reminded me an article about counting in Huli.
abe lebe lebene golebene ogolebene ogogolebene – yesterday, day before yesterday, day before the day before yesterday,…
jawi luma lumani golumani ogolumani ogogolumani – tomorrow, ….
(Of these I remembered …. lebene, golebene, ogogolebene)
Russian speakers here must understand why I wanted to read about Huli, and why I remember ogogolebene.
That’s why I made up “postpeninitial”.
You did not make up “post-peninitial” just now, you only misspelt it. Admittedly, most Google hits are statements of how rare post-peninitial stress is.
Is there a widely known langauge that counts stress from the left?
@Vanya: But if you consider the implications of having almost started, it could be posited that a word with peninitial stress is one whose stress is on the last syllable of the word preceding it.
@drasvi:
Mapudungun:
https://wals.info/chapter/14
Waddya mean, “Not widely known”? It’s in the Mouton Grammar Library series*, and everything! It has a language setting of its own in Microsoft Windows! It’s basically a language for suits.
Proto-Ainu** had stress on the second mora, but the loss of vowel length in most dialects has made stress contrastive.
* Which is so white-bread and mainstream that it features no Oti-Volta languages whatsoever!
** Widely known among Hatters.
Technically, the many languages with fixed word-initial stress count stress from the left, too, I suppose. The count just doesn’t get very far …
‘Hemipelagic’ is another one that I wish they’d thought up a different word for. I’m trying to learn about the sea, and constantly misreading it as ‘hemiplegic’.
@mollymooly: OK, I independently made it up. Damn web spoils everything.
I might still use the omission of the hyphen as evidence of my relative uniqueness.
The WALS map shows two Basque varieties with peninitial stress, one with initial, three with penultimate, and four with no particular preference. Huh.
Garden variety official suppletion.
Thanks, Y.
WALS always bothers me when I start looking at details that I’m in a position to check.
One of the very few West African languages said to have fixed initial stress which is featured is Supyire, referencing Carlson 1994. This grammar unfortunately has very little information on stress, but does explicitly say “in the majority of lexical roots (including all verbs) the initial syllable is stressed, but there are a number of roots with an unstressed initial syllable.” (My bolding.) Moreover, nouns may have (presumably unstressed) derivational prefixes, and verb flexion also involves prefixes; Carlson describes all of these as “prefixes”, not proclitics.
A similar problem appears with Diola-Fogny. David Sapir’s grammar in fact says that stress appears on the first syllable of “themes” (stems, effectively), not words; both noun and verb flexion involves extensive prefixation.
However, Rennison’s grammar of Koromfe does say that “stress is always located on the first syllable of a word.” So I’ll give WALS one out of three.
The pattern of word stress in fact going on the first (or only) syllable of roots (rather than words) turns up in Kusaal too, and seems to be general in Oti-Volta, though few descriptions say much at all about stress, which seems rarely if ever to be contrastive. (In principle, it is potentially contrastive in Kusaal, but I can’t contrive any actual minimal pairs.)
i’m still just reading “penitential stress” every single time.
which is presumably an active factor in lects that have a ritual-status distinction in their prosody (as opposed to merely lexical or syntactic marking).
Yes; Fundstelle. (German doesn’t have a word straightforwardly translatable as “site”.)
For the full details on Basque stress and pitch, follow the second link in the OP.
About my earlier comparison with names of days in Huli.
I realised that the similarity is indeed striking: two structurally similar (but otherwise different) problems were solved by (technologically) stone-age people from PNG and English-speaking linguists in two structurally very similar ways.
__
The Russian solution is slightly different, we say tomorrow, aftertomorrow, afteraftertomorrow… afterafterafterafterafteraftertomorrow and so on. Except we don’t usually say it, but it is grammatical for any number of afters.
@DM: Lovely! Thank you.
The Russian solution is slightly different
German does the same: gestern, vorgestern, vorvorgestern…, morgen, übermorgen, überübermorgen…, and it’s theoretically possible to stack the prefixes endlessly, too, but in practice people usually switch to vor / in X Tagen instead of going on stacking.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, even vorvorgestern/überübermorgen are rare and if used have definite jocular quality. In my experience, people in such cases switch to the day of the week or the date.
Same in Russian, but somehow it doesn’t feel “ungrammatical”.
Practically I do use long chains for great-great-great-grandchildren. (not sure if English speakers do it, but I think they don’t “feel ungrammatical” in English either).
If we were sufficiently smart we would also deal with meta-meta-meta-[something, e.g. analyses].
überübermorgen I think I sometimes used it (the similar Russian word) when I was a child. Or even “when I was younger”.
As a 6-year old my daughter used “yesterday’s yesterday” for vorgestern. I loved it but eventually she fell in line with common practice.
it’s theoretically possible to stack the prefixes endlessly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism
One of my favourite disease names, though not as evocative as the country-and-western hit Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, or the B-movie grindhouse horror Histiocytosis X (which is set on the dread Islets of Langerhans.)
set on the dread Islets of Langerhans
Not far from Smegma and Spasmodic.
Ryan, wow! As a math lover I love it.
@ulr: I’ve heard vorvorgestern being used without humorous intent, but yes, any stacking beyond that is either jocular or produced by children fascinated by the process.
I’ve used it, and überübermorgen, but both rarely (the more common alternative is the day of the week); never jocularly, though, and probably never stacked further either.
Hemidemisemiquaver = semidemisemiquaver waves hello.
(WP: “Notes shorter than a sixty-fourth note are very rarely used, though the hundred twenty-eighth note—otherwise known as the semihemidemisemiquaver—and even shorter notes, are occasionally found.”
Ed.: And then some.
The Ode of the Homeopathic World Congress is famously written in a feisty 4/262144 beat with intricate runs of hemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemiquavers.
This younger grad student in linguistics (finished 2014, some seminars in phonology even) has never heard this term either.
Compared with semihemidemisemiquaver, quasihemidemisemiquaver is less semantomorphoetymologically correct but more user friendly; in longer names in the series each -quasi- works like the thousands-separator point/comma/space.
@Jerry, Brett (and some others), eureka.
Verbs of movement have dimension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis
Think of this Russian distance:
5 minút xódu “5 minutes of walking”
xódu is partitive (or quantitative) of “going”
minút is same (coinciding with genitive) of “minute”
“minutes of walking” is a unit of distance.
A minute is a unit of time, it has a dimension.
Then of walking has a dimension too.
drasvi, in school they taught me that sometimes samovar was a measure of distance.
D.O. which way? How do you measure distance in samovars?
(now trying to invent a measure based on the fact that in Morocco samovars made of precious metals are a part of dowry.* but can’t think of something that both has a dimension and has to do with sex)
___
*not exactly ‘dowry’, the woman will give that samovar to her daughter.
as a cantabridgian, i feel i should mention oliver smoot, who is not only a unit of measurement (length) but a former ANSI chairman and ISO president.
and am i right to think that a samovar as a unit of distance would be in relation to the speed of a train (or post coach), the way a cigarette (or pipe) can slide from measuring time to measuring (walked) distance?
drasvi, the idea is that people took samovars on the trips between towns. The distance than was measured in how many samovars their were likely to need for tea for the duration of the trip.
D.O. thanks! But does not one need Kvak glasses* for this?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosteels_Brewery#Pauwel_Kwak
WALS: there is a way to make it better: iterative improvements over years by many people, like WP. Incompatible with funding from grants, and won’t bring citations. Not for competetive science. But the day will come when AI will do such things!
Until then we aren’t going to have a second WALS.. but that day, it will come sooner than you think! Ha-ha.