This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
The title should have a lower-case m in keeping with Wikipedia capitalization policy. But I-mutation already exists, as an inaccurate substub of an article that should be deleted to make room for the far superior text at I-Mutation. -- Angr/ comhrá 06:58, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I wonder if it would not be better to name this "i-mutation in Germanic languages" or similar. On past experience, if this is not specified, people will come along complaining that the article is POV towards Germanic, and will expand with data from Japanese, Hebrew etc to the point where the whole piece loses its focus. I think this article would benefit from staying focussed on Germanics, so I would recommend pre-empting that; after all, i-mutation in other languages is important enough to have its own article. -- Doric Loon 17:28, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
First off, let me say that Benwing's work here is great. This goes into much more detail than anything we had before, and once it has been completed, it will be a valuable article. HOWEVER, as I have said to Benwing on his own talkpage, we have a slight problem of overlap, because there is already an article on umlaut, which is synonymous with "Germanic i-mutation". Now I know that some linguists have used the word "umlaut" more generally as a synonym for vowel harmony, and Benwing seems to have reconciled the problem in his own mind by understanding the word that way. But that is neither the original meaning of Umlaut nor the most common use in modern linguistics; we had a debate about this on the Umlaut talk-page and several user talk-pages some time ago, and seemed to have a consensus that we would use such terms in their more precise meanings and simply acknowledge the possibility of fuzzier usage in passing. That is what the umlaut article does. Which brings us to the problem: we have two articles on synonymous terms saying much the same thing. What are we going to do about that? I can see two possibilities, but we need to talk about them.
My own vote would be for something along the lines of this second option, thought the first would be less messy - the umlaut article has quite a neat balance as it is. -- Doric Loon 18:13, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree that
vowel harmony is the place to discuss i-mutation in Welsh. I see no reason why this article, or
umlaut and
a-mutation for that matter, should be restricted to Germanic. I think this article should be about any fronting/raising process triggered by a following high front vocoid, regardless of what language it's attested in. Likewise
a-mutation shouldn't be restricted to Germanic but should include lowering caused by a following /a/ in other languages as well (again an example from Welsh: gwyn 'white (masc.)' < *windos vs. gwen 'white (fem.)' < *windā).
Umlaut should mostly be about the written sign, with an indication that it also the name for processes like
i-mutation and
a-mutation.
Vowel harmony should be about the left-to-right processes typical of Uralic and Altaic languages. That's what I think. --
Angr/
comhrá
12:18, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
OK, I've just found other references to "vowel harmony" as "progressive" vowel assimilation. ("Progressive" is a better term than "left-to-right" since it is not biased against Semitic languages which go the opposite way across the page!) I will therefore accept your point about "vowel harmony". "Metaphony" would be the general word, and should perhaps be the name of an overview article from which all these other pieces with their varying degrees of specialisation (to a particular type, to a particular language) should be cross-referenced. Are you comfortable with that? -- Doric Loon 14:07, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Compare it with politics. We have articles on constitution, prime minister, cabinet etc, which talk about a concept as it appears in lots of countries. And then we have articles on American constitution, British prime minister etc, which give a very valuable depth that the general articles just can't. I can see the broad cross-language comparisons are what interest you most, which is fine. We can do both. -- Doric Loon 18:22, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
The article says:
How does one know that Gothic never had i-mutations? The records we have of Gothic are from the period prior to "around 450 or 500 AD" (when i-mutation began in other Germanic dialect) so the fact that Gothic had no i-mutation doesn't prove anything. No other dialect of Germanic had i-mutation either. Jens Persson ( 213.67.64.22 01:30, 17 December 2006 (UTC))
There are also (Crimean) Gothic records from Early Modern times. -- Doric Loon 10:56, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
The title should have a lower-case m in keeping with Wikipedia capitalization policy. But I-mutation already exists, as an inaccurate substub of an article that should be deleted to make room for the far superior text at I-Mutation. -- Angr/ comhrá 06:58, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I wonder if it would not be better to name this "i-mutation in Germanic languages" or similar. On past experience, if this is not specified, people will come along complaining that the article is POV towards Germanic, and will expand with data from Japanese, Hebrew etc to the point where the whole piece loses its focus. I think this article would benefit from staying focussed on Germanics, so I would recommend pre-empting that; after all, i-mutation in other languages is important enough to have its own article. -- Doric Loon 17:28, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
First off, let me say that Benwing's work here is great. This goes into much more detail than anything we had before, and once it has been completed, it will be a valuable article. HOWEVER, as I have said to Benwing on his own talkpage, we have a slight problem of overlap, because there is already an article on umlaut, which is synonymous with "Germanic i-mutation". Now I know that some linguists have used the word "umlaut" more generally as a synonym for vowel harmony, and Benwing seems to have reconciled the problem in his own mind by understanding the word that way. But that is neither the original meaning of Umlaut nor the most common use in modern linguistics; we had a debate about this on the Umlaut talk-page and several user talk-pages some time ago, and seemed to have a consensus that we would use such terms in their more precise meanings and simply acknowledge the possibility of fuzzier usage in passing. That is what the umlaut article does. Which brings us to the problem: we have two articles on synonymous terms saying much the same thing. What are we going to do about that? I can see two possibilities, but we need to talk about them.
My own vote would be for something along the lines of this second option, thought the first would be less messy - the umlaut article has quite a neat balance as it is. -- Doric Loon 18:13, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree that
vowel harmony is the place to discuss i-mutation in Welsh. I see no reason why this article, or
umlaut and
a-mutation for that matter, should be restricted to Germanic. I think this article should be about any fronting/raising process triggered by a following high front vocoid, regardless of what language it's attested in. Likewise
a-mutation shouldn't be restricted to Germanic but should include lowering caused by a following /a/ in other languages as well (again an example from Welsh: gwyn 'white (masc.)' < *windos vs. gwen 'white (fem.)' < *windā).
Umlaut should mostly be about the written sign, with an indication that it also the name for processes like
i-mutation and
a-mutation.
Vowel harmony should be about the left-to-right processes typical of Uralic and Altaic languages. That's what I think. --
Angr/
comhrá
12:18, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
OK, I've just found other references to "vowel harmony" as "progressive" vowel assimilation. ("Progressive" is a better term than "left-to-right" since it is not biased against Semitic languages which go the opposite way across the page!) I will therefore accept your point about "vowel harmony". "Metaphony" would be the general word, and should perhaps be the name of an overview article from which all these other pieces with their varying degrees of specialisation (to a particular type, to a particular language) should be cross-referenced. Are you comfortable with that? -- Doric Loon 14:07, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Compare it with politics. We have articles on constitution, prime minister, cabinet etc, which talk about a concept as it appears in lots of countries. And then we have articles on American constitution, British prime minister etc, which give a very valuable depth that the general articles just can't. I can see the broad cross-language comparisons are what interest you most, which is fine. We can do both. -- Doric Loon 18:22, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
The article says:
How does one know that Gothic never had i-mutations? The records we have of Gothic are from the period prior to "around 450 or 500 AD" (when i-mutation began in other Germanic dialect) so the fact that Gothic had no i-mutation doesn't prove anything. No other dialect of Germanic had i-mutation either. Jens Persson ( 213.67.64.22 01:30, 17 December 2006 (UTC))
There are also (Crimean) Gothic records from Early Modern times. -- Doric Loon 10:56, 19 December 2006 (UTC)