22
votes
Is "illegal" an example of nasal place assimilation in English?
English doesn't have those rules: unlucky, unlikely, unwritten, unready.
Those are rules of Latin, so we see them in English words that were borrowed from Latin (sometimes directly, sometimes via ...
- 63.8k
15
votes
Is "illegal" an example of nasal place assimilation in English?
Regardless of whether you consider that alternation to be part of English phonology, it is not place assimilation, it is manner assimilation. The change of /n/ to [ŋ] before velars and /n/ to [m] ...
- 81.9k
9
votes
Is "illegal" an example of nasal place assimilation in English?
Other posts have covered that illegal is not "place" assimilation.
The etymological origin of words starting with ill- is irrelevant to the grammar of modern English. Some words may have ...
- 17.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Does assimilation of voice produce different phonemes, or just allophones?
There is no clear answer to the title question in general; it may depend on the sounds, or the language. (Well, unless you define "assimilation" in such a way as to explicitly refer to a ...
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7
votes
Accepted
How did Gothic "𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌱𐌰𐌷𐍄𐌹" (andbahti) become Medieval Latin "ambasiator"?
I think a likly path to the "s" is through "kt" (as in ambactus) which then palatalized before j. A variety of spellings are apparently found in this word and related words such as ...
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6
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Is "illegal" an example of nasal place assimilation in English?
Definetely not in English. The word illegal was borrowed from Latin when the assimilation already had happened. This assimilation is also not a productive process in English.
As user6726 has already ...
- 29.8k
5
votes
Accepted
Assimilation Help
Did you make sure you have understood what assimilation means in general, not only, as you said, "in this context"? I think this task is pretty straightforward if you stick close to the definitions ...
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5
votes
How can I tell the difference between types of assimilation?
This is less of an absolute classification, and more just a description of what's happening in a particular circumstance in a particular language.
Assimilation means one thing is becoming more like ...
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5
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/ðæs saɪd/ versus /ɡʊb bɔɪ/ - Assimilation of place versus manner
It is questionable whether there is such a thing as "assimilation of manner" in the same sense that there is assimilation of place. Assimilation of place traditionally refers to wholesale ...
- 81.9k
4
votes
Does assimilation of voice produce different phonemes, or just allophones?
They are called allomorphs. It refers to phonological variations of a same morpheme. See the In English suffixes section of the given wikipedia article. It gives an example of the past tense morpheme -...
- 357
4
votes
Accepted
How did French take over Walloon in Belgium?
I think you are conflating two, very different things :
how a language acquires a place of social prestige and dominance, and how a language replaces another in the population.
Now of course, a ...
- 1,023
4
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Examples of Umlaut in a living language
As I understand it, the essential character which you're seeking is that it is regressive suffix-to-root assimilation (not progressive, and not bidirectional), and the trigger has to actually be there....
- 81.9k
4
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Did PIE *h3 cause voicing in any other words than the "drink" word?
Turns out there's at least one other suggested, but controversial, case of voicing by *h3, involving the "Hoffmann suffix" *-Hon- or *-h3on-. Piotr Gąsiorowski discusses it here. The same suffix may ...
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3
votes
What is a word that assimilates loanwords called?
Kazakh ету sounds like it might pattern with the concept of "light verbs" in the literature (a semantically light or empty verb that converts other parts of speech into predicates). Granted, ...
- 5,065
3
votes
Assimilation: What is the process in which both phonemes change?
I don't know of a standard term. I'd refer to it as mutual assimilation. The change in Sanskrit of ai to ee = e: is an example. So far as I know, there's nothing special about it, as compared with ...
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3
votes
Different assimilation directions
I believe that Chomsky and Halle's SPE theory predicts progressive assimilation of voice.
For English morphologically simple forms, the only way you can have a weak word initial syllable followed ...
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3
votes
How did Gothic "𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌱𐌰𐌷𐍄𐌹" (andbahti) become Medieval Latin "ambasiator"?
The shift of /k/ to /h/ is regular in Germanic (assuming that the borrowing from Celtic to Germanic is very old: i.e. pre-Grimm). But I do not see why the Romance forms should derive from Gothic, ...
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3
votes
Is /v/ cross-linguistically semi-voiced and powerless in devoicing preceding consonants in case of regressive assimilation? How to explain it?
I don't have an explanation from a synchronic phonetic perspective.
From a diachronic and phonological perspective, /v/ in many languages, including Danish and Russian, developed from earlier /w/. ...
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2
votes
/ðæs saɪd/ versus /ɡʊb bɔɪ/ - Assimilation of place versus manner
In good boy, /ɡʊb bɔɪ/, we see that the last consonant of good has become a /b/. In isolation the last consonant of good would be a /d/. If we give these two phonemes their Voice Place Manner labels, /...
- 3,962
2
votes
The reason for a partly voiced hold in I’d
You need to frame this as a broader and testable question, and the investigation has to be conducted with some underlying theory of what might be happening. I think you can probably control speaker, ...
- 81.9k
2
votes
Accepted
Sandhi vs Assimilation?
Neither term would be wrong. They aren't mutually exclusive: sandhi is broadly defined as a phonological process crossing word boundaries, while assimilation is broadly defined as a phonological ...
- 63.8k
2
votes
Examples of Umlaut in a living language
In German, umlaut is admittedly no longer productive, but it is still very much in evidence in words like Mann > Männer, Kuh > Kühe, and many more.
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2
votes
Accepted
What is a word that assimilates loanwords called?
Linguistic literature in typology (e.g. the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization) calls this a "pro-verb", the basic idea behind that name being that, like a pronoun, it's semantically empty ...
- 1,114
2
votes
Geminate consonants by total assimilation in English
First off, there is a distinction between geminates and fake geminates. Conventionally, we tend to write [tt, ss, nn] for all longish consonants, but the term "geminate" is usually reserved ...
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1
vote
Accepted
Can /t/ get assimilated to /ʃ/?
/t/ can assimilate to /ʃ/, i.e. /tʃ/ can become [ʃʃ]. However, what is happening in that video is something totally different. This is known as "lenition", a feature of some dialects (on the ...
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1
vote
What is a word that assimilates loanwords called?
This is too long for a comment ...
The phenomenon is not unique to the Kazakh language, it also occurs in Jenisch (A German based argot) and here is an example from Wörterbuch der Gauner- und ...
- 29.8k
1
vote
Examples of Umlaut in a living language
Maybe Standard High German counts in here:
In High German, the plural of Fuß "foot" is Füße with double marking: both umlaut and the ending -e /ə/ occur. Note that the dialectal basis of the so-...
- 29.8k
1
vote
Accepted
What languages have rounding assimilation/harmony with glides?
I'll start with the analytic problem. Suppose in a language, /kon-ie/ → konue. That resembles but is distinct from what you are (apparently) interested in. This is just plain old rounding harmony (or ...
- 81.9k
1
vote
Assimilation: What is the process in which both phonemes change?
"Bidirectional assimilation" is an unlikely name for that kind of case, which constitutes "gemination" or "geminate formation". "Bidirectional assimilation" is generally used for the assimilation of a ...
- 81.9k
1
vote
How to write sonorant assimilation rule?
Here is an attempt at an SPE style rule (except that reference to the "." syllable boundary would not be allowed by SPE conventions):
[-son] -> [+son, alpha place, C] / [+son, alpha place, C] __ V ...
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