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#165355 01/22/07 03:13 PM
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tsu: Thank you for that as I never would have thought of using OneLook

More to the point:
metathesis intitle:synonyms
gets 100 GHits

Try it


dalehileman
#165356 01/22/07 03:26 PM
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Well, metathesis is rather easy to look up. And, for those who are not about to click, here's a short definition: "Transposition within a Wword of letters, sounds, or syllables, as in the change from Old English brid to modern English bird or in the confusion of modren for modern." [A-H] As nearly anybody can see from that quoted definition, metathesis it ain't.




What is it, then, Nuncle? As I suggested in my first post, "metathesis" may be too specific for what Max wants, since there's no switching of consecutive sounds involved. Or has the term become somewhat broader these days, AHD notwithstanding? In which case your subtle subject line would indeed be an example thereof? Huh? Huh??

(I kinda like "anticipatory assimilation" my own sef)

#165357 01/22/07 03:38 PM
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Faldo's anticipatory assimilation works well enough for me. There's a kind of assimilation at a distance in Hungarian and Turkish called vowel harmony, and there's even a Wikipedia entry for consonant harmony. In assimilation, the sound don't just change, it becomes more like one it's assimilating to. There's also dissimilation, where two sounds are alike, and one changes so as to be less alike. You see this in Romance languages where there might be two rs in a Latin word in adjacent syllables, and one dissimilates to an l. (I'll try to find an example later this evening.)


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
#165358 01/22/07 03:55 PM
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Yes! Mr von Fong came up with an example of that in Spanish: inmoral. I'd love to see other examples. I don't think dissimilation occurs in Port.

#165359 01/22/07 04:15 PM
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You have to be at sea?


TEd
#165360 01/22/07 04:53 PM
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You have to be at sea?




With you, TEd, I usually am at sea...

#165361 01/22/07 04:57 PM
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tsu: Thank you for that as I never would have thought of using OneLook

More to the point:
metathesis intitle:synonyms
gets 100 GHits

Try it




why would I want to? onelook is a better tool for the purpose; but if I was truly stuck on googling, I'd try "define metathesis" or "thesaurus metathesis". the first page of hits should get me anything I need.

#165362 01/22/07 05:23 PM
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During my commute to work this morning, I remembered the classic case of assimilation in Romance: Engish pilgrim from Old French peligrin from Late Latin pelegrinus from Latin peregrinus 'foreigner' (cf Italian pelegrino). Here the two rs are in different syllables. Another example of anticipatory assimilation is umlaut in Germanic languages (e.g., man ~ men, foot ~ feet :- the umlaut is because the low or mid vowel is assimilating to the high front vowel which then disappeared in the final syllable (i.e., the plural ending). Umlaut also appears in other languages, e.g., Ligurian Italian dialects, man ~ moen 'hand(s)', can ~ chen 'dog(s).

[Added following text.]

I found a nice lecture on language change at the UPenn linguistics website. Mark Liberman of Language Log is teaching the class.

Last edited by zmjezhd; 01/22/07 06:13 PM.
#165363 01/22/07 06:19 PM
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I found a nice lecture on language change at the UPenn linguistics website. Mark Liberman of Language Log is teaching the class.




Grazie, zio.

#165364 01/22/07 11:18 PM
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Yes! Mr von Fong came up with an example of that in Spanish: inmoral. I'd love to see other examples. I don't think dissimilation occurs in Port.




My first thought on this was that, e.g., inmoral was the original so that it was not an example of dissimilation, but in this and other inm- examples from Spanish the assimilation had already occurred in the Latin. I'd have some trouble believing that this was a learned conceit, not unlike the s in English island or the b in doubt, so perhaps it is dissimilation. Any thoughts on that, nuncle?

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