[INDOLOGY] Sandhi and grammar

[Caley Smith]

Welsh lenition has a similar phenomenon, it looks morpho-phonemic on the
surface because of its history.
For example cath = cat but with masculine definite article* y gath *[the
male cat] with feminine definite article* y chath* [the female cat].
Because *y *is pronounced the same for both genders, it looks like lenition
can "see" gender morphology, but in fact
it must go back to a time when the masc. article went back to something
ending in a vowel like Sanskrit asya and the fem. article went back to
something similar to Sanskrit asyās such that that -s in sandhi aspirated
the beginning of the next word
while the final vowel of the masc. article voiced the beginning of the next
work. Once a speaker learns these alternations,
they are de facto morphophonemic sandhi rules, but their history is just
that their originally distinct speech sounds were erased by time.

 Caley

On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 11:27 PM Andrew Ollett via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Dear Harry,
>
> You might consult some of Paul Kiparsky's work on Lexical Phonology (e.g.,
> “Some Consequences of Lexical Phonology” in *Phonology Yearbook *2
> [1985]: 85–138) and more recently in Stratal Optimality Theory (e.g.,
> https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/reduplication.pdf, which has
> some examples from Sanskrit, and
> https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/taipei.2014.pdf). Basically:
> sandhi consists of a set of phonological constraints which apply at
> multiple levels of the language, including the level of the stem, the word,
> and the phrase.
>
> Andrew
>
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 9:58 PM rajam via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Kindly pardon my ignorance. Please let us know how you define “grammar.”
>>
>> Thanks and regards,
>> rajam
>>
>>
>> On Feb 22, 2024, at 7:02 AM, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>> Dear list members,
>> I've wondered for a long time why sanskrit sandhi has any dependence on
>> grammar and is not solely determined by preceding or following
>> letters/sounds.
>>
>> For example why should internal sandhi have any differences from external
>> sandhi. As MacDonell says, "The most notable divergence from external
>> sandhi is the unchangeableness of the final consonans of verbal and nominal
>> stems before terminations beginning with vowels, semivowels and nasal
>>
>> Or why should  *ī *,*ū* or *e* when dual terminations (and only when
>> dual terminations) remain unchanged before vowels.
>>
>> In other words, in these cases why should grammar and not just adjacent
>> sounds determine whether sandhi occurs.
>> Thanks,
>> Harry Spier
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20240223/d1189113/attachment.htm>