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Internal Reconstruction of Juncture for Proto-Greek

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

David H. Kelly
David H. Kelly*
Affiliation:
La Salle College
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Extract

In a recent article Stockwell, Bowen, and Silva-Fuenzalida were able to prove that word boundary in Spanish is phonologically significant, that is to say phonemic, determining the occurrence of particular allophones within otherwise identical environments. This may also be expressed by saying that a phoneme of juncture occurs between some words in Spanish. The authors compare items like the following: [eŋoxo] en ojo ‘in (the) eye’ vs. [eneros] eneros ‘Januaries’ (a contrast found in the Caribbean and Central American areas and elsewhere); [ezdeaki] vs. [ezðeaki] es de aqui ‘he's from here’ (both forms found in all dialects). To avoid setting up [ŋ], [n], [ð], and [d] as four separate phonemes, they assume a juncture to exist in the phrases, en + oxo/ and /es + de + aki/. Hence they analyze [ŋ] and [d] as the allophones of /n/ and /d/ proper before and after plus juncture respectively.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 36 , Issue 3: July-September , September 1960, pp. 351 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 R. Stockwell, J. Bowen, and I. Silva-Fuenzalida, Spanish juncture and intonation, Lg. 32. 641–65 (1956).

2 Words are defined for Greek by means of morphological criteria. For example, there is a class of words we call nouns, consisting of a stem or stems and a set of case endings. Notice also that our reconstructed juncture fulfills the third requirement of Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff in their article on accent and juncture in English in For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1956): ‘Junctures should be distributed in a manner that is significant on higher levels. Specifically, junctures should appear only at morpheme boundaries, and different junctures should correspond, by and large, to different morphological and syntactical processes’ (67).

3 This sound change seems to have occurred after the shortening of inherited long vowels that were followed by sonant and stop (Osthoff's law). We have attested égnon from ∗egnōnt, éstan from ∗estānt, etc. See M. Lejeune, Traité de phonétique grecque 2 188–9 (Paris, 1955). As Chafe has most recently stated, the results obtained from internal reconstruction are necessarily projected back into different stages of the proto-language. Without documentary evidence, only relative chronology is reconstructable. See W. L. Chafe, Internal reconstruction in Seneca, Lg. 35.481 (1959).

4 Cf. H. M. Hoenigswald, The principal step in comparative grammar, Lg. 26.357–64 (1950).

5 The word is spelled with one rho in the manuscripts. We assume a double rho to account for the length of the preceding syllable.

6 The first iota is a result of dissimilation. We expect ∗eúrēnai.

7 Lejeune 154.

8 Ionic kheílioi, with the spurious diphthong, is the expected form. The Attic long iota is the result of an assimilation.

9 See W. Austin, The prothetic vowel in Greek, Lg. 17.83–92 (1941), and Edgar Sturtevant, The Indo-Hittite laryngeals 76–7 (Baltimore, 1942). The usual interpretation is that the long scansion is simply a metrical device based upon phrases like hópote lḗkseien and katà moîran, where it is certainly necessary to reconstruct a sibilant before the sonant.