Pabappa/scratchpad

sound changes

Scratchpad ordered by date

Pronouns and person markers

Apr 27, 2020

• Pabappa probably needs person markers on verbs because I cannot find a language that has nominal possession markers without also having verbal person markers. The verbal person markers will be suffixed after the tense marker and may or may not be cognate to the nominal possession markers. The third person verbal marker is probably Ø. The first and second person, if cognate to the nominal possession markers, may be either identical to them, or derived from the same stems but without the original final /-s/. But note that the final /-s/ may not have made a difference in the surface forms anyway.

• Deriving pronouns could be a first step to getting both verbal person markers and justifying the nominal possession markers.

• If the first person pronoun comes from Play šuvi a bu "(I) feel that (I) speak", i.e. "one speaking", it could evolve into just o or u in a standalone form but would be preceded by -ps- word-internally. There is no easy way to simplify this cluster.
• If instead it comes from Play šuvi a ba (effectively the same meaning as above), it would evolve into one of oa ~ ua ~ wa in bare form and to psoa ~ psua word-finally.

• The uncertainty above about the tonic vowel is because it is not certain that Pabappa analogized /u/ > /o/ in closed syllables the way Poswa did ... it is actually quite likely that it was not analogized, because Pabappa would have very little precedent for this shift whereas Poswa had a large number of verbs where /o/ appeared in both closed and open syllable forms of the verb.
• pu is another possibility. The path is

• Play šuvi a bu > pšulabu > pšužu > pšu > šu > hu > fu > wu (free) and pu (suffix). This would still happen only in the bare form, and so for it to be a suffix it would need to have been reordered at some stage, preferably towards the end when /f/ would have been seen as just an ordinary phoneme. The nominal possession marker could be an unetymological po or pa, or a more proper (but still reliant on analogy) -so ~ -sa.

• Similarly,

• Play šuvi a ba > pšulaba > pšuža > pšua > šua > hua > fua > wua (free) and pua (suffix), but there is no way to compress /wua/ > /wa/.

• Any form deriving from a bare /šuvi/ in Play is unlikely because it would be identical to a content word and would end in a consonant.
• Second person at first seems simpler, if the brightest path is taken:

• Play ma nuvi aa > mabulā > mabyža > mabʷa > maba in free form (note that it is not /mabu/), and
• Play ma nuvi aa > mabulā > mabyža > mʲyža > vyža > viza ~ voza > dia ~ doa, almost certainly with loss of /a/ due to some sort of analogy, likely then followed by stabilization as either /di/, /do/, or /da/. It is possible also that /vyža/ > /vža/ since it would only ever occur after a vowel, and then /vža/ > /vza/ > /va/ > /da/ directly. This calls into question whether /vz/ should be treated separately from /v/ and /z/, however, since the shifts of /v/ > /d/ and /z/ > /Ø/ are listed as simultaneous, when they were likely separated by at least a few decades.

• Yet another possibility is that /vz/ > /uz/ (since the /v/ was always labialized), and then /uz/ > /u/ > /w/. This would mean that the second person marker is always and only -wa.
• The 2nd person pronoun could be ta in order to avoid repetition like "wa .....-wa", even though this is etymologically improper. Alternatively, a new, suppletive 2nd person pronoun could arise for at least the nominative form.
• Could do /vʷz/ > /bz/ > /b/ instead, making the 2nd person marker -ba instead of /-wa/ or any of the others, which would in some verbs lead to a combined suffix /-baba/ which superficially resembles Poswa.

Other ideas

in case i dont get around to it:

Visibly deformed babies are usually not killed, because in nearly all births, other women will have seen the baby immediately after birth, and will then appear in court and alert the judge to what they suspect has happened. For a mother to get away with this crime, all of her close female friends must be in on the conspiracy and then, if the crime is discovered by an outside party, appear in court to back up the mother's claim that the death was unpreventable.