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Phonetic Similarity in Internal Reconstruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Henry M. Hoenigswald
Henry M. Hoenigswald*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

In calling attention to the shortcomings of the existing theory of internal reconstruction, Wallace L. Chafe finds it

instructive … to consider two different morph alternations which Hoenigswald cites in different places in his article. One is the alternation -t-/-þ- ‘past participle’ in Gothic (hafts ‘restrained’ / salbōþs ‘anointed'). -t- occurs after f, h, and s, while -þ- occurs in all other environments. The other alternation is bunt-/bund- ‘alliance’ in German. bunt- occurs in syllable-final position, bund- in all other environments. The most economical inferences based on these data are that in Gothic either (a) þ > t after f, h, and s, or (b) t > þ everywhere except after f, h, and s; and that in German either (a) d > t in syllable final position, or (b) t > d everywhere except in syllable-final position. Hoenigswald chooses inference (b) for Gothic, inference (a) for German. The completely parallel data provide no basis for these opposite choices, much less for the conclusion that the Gothic situation ‘allows us to reconstruct one original morpheme -to-’.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 36 , Issue 2-Part1: April-June , June 1960, pp. 191 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Lg. 35.477 (1959). Chafe then goes on to discuss very successfully some more serious shortcomings of the existing treatments (to which now add Hoenigswald, Language change 99–111 [Chicago, 1960]). A mild protest is in order only with regard to his use of ‘correspondence’ for ‘alternation’, ‘morphophoneme’ or the like, simply because it may occasionally be useful to consider correspondences (between two languages) and alternations (within one or each), side by side in the framework of one and the same procedure.

2 [Lg. 22.138–43 (1946) = Readings in linguistics 139–41.]

3 [Since the stem of salbōþs is salbōd-, with a separate morphophonemic replacement of d by þ in the nominative, the example was not strictly correct. Its retention here for the sake of simplicity does not vitiate the argument. IE t actually split three ways: into þ, t, and (under Verner's law) d.]

4 [Footnote] Written phonemically.

5 More precisely: after p > f; k' (etc.) > h …

6 It would have been better to punctuate: ‘one original morpheme, “-to”.‘

7 See Lg. 35.415, Fig. 6 (1959). The Gothic and the German example are therefore phonetically discrepant (see below): in the latter the contrast remains roughly in the same area, in the former it shifts across the phonetic table, with ‘[t]‘ for an overlap.

8 The use of /x/, /y/, in Lg. 22, implying permanence from stage to stage, was therefore misleading.