Talk:Assibilation

neologism?

I tried Googling this term, but got only 8 hits, some of which seemed to be misspellings of "assimilation". Is this term actually used in linguistic literature or is it a neologism?

Peter ^Isotalo 20:56, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Google isn't a good reference for linguistics, then. The same term has been also used for the change k → s in Samoyedic, and the term "assibilation" is found in Virittäjä (the Finnish linguistics journal) references. --Vuo 10:13, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Could you provide an English-language reference that uses it? To be honest, I'm having trouble understanding why we couldn't include this in assimilation (linguistics), which is a stub right now. It's not helpful to readers to create sub-stubs instead of including this kind of information in higher-level articles.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:20, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

This site, for example, is such a reference; one sound change in the gay lisp is assibilation. Assibilation is a particular mechanism of sound change. Assimilation is a particular type of sound change. Although the particular example in the article is assimilation, it needn't to be. These could be other examples: the sound change 'th → s' in some non-native accents of English, or the diachronic assibilation of word-final 't' in Pohjanmaa dialect of Finnish, or the paragogic 's' onto '-e' sometimes seen in Finnish. --Vuo 09:33, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

No, Wikipedia itself is not a valid reference to prove the validity of certain terms; that's launching a neologism. You need to use outside linguistic sources, or it will be considered original research, even if the analysis makes sense. At the very least make a proper citation of it's usage in Virittäjä.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:19, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

hi. this is a term in linguistics, although it is not as common as other terms. it usually refers to palatalization with frication. so, alveolar stop → postalveolar fricative/affricate. it has a specific name because this is rather common, historically & synchronically. since you doubt its existence, you can find some references listed here: http://www.silinternational.net/linguistics/glossary_fe/glossary.asp?entryid=9323&src=y. peace – ishwar  (speak) 23:08, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

usage examples

i provide examples (both old & recent) of these term appearing the journal, Language, below. (of course more examples can be found.)

"As far as our present knowledge goes Tocharian treats palatals and labio-velars alike. Indo-European kͨ [c] appear as k in ḳante ‘hundred,’ okṭ ‘eight,’ etc., while a secondary assibilation gives ç before original front vowels, as in miço ‘urine’ beside Gātha-Avestan maēzaiti ‘he urinates,’ palaçalñe ‘a burning’ beside Avestan brāzaiti ‘it shines’ and Greek φλέγω ‘I burn.’ Just so Indo-European q^w [kʷ] appears as k in piṅkte ‘fifth’ and in derivatives of the relative-interrogative pronoun, such as kupre ‘if’ and kwri ‘when,’ while Indo-European g^w [gʷ] yields kakmu ‘having come,’ with perfect reduplication of the root *g^wem [gʷem]. Indo-European q^w [kʷ] shows the secondary assibilation in piç, piṣ ‘five,’ çem ‘he has come,’ etc...." (Sturtevant 1926:27-28)

"It is customary, to be sure, to ascribe the instances of incorrect dichotomy in the palatal shift to borrowing from Gmc. or some other language. Yet the following seems to be equally plausible, namely that the process of palatalization and 'assibilation had taken place at a time—if not exclusively in hoariest antiquity—when parts of the satem area came in contact with those of the centum territory; a mutual readjustment and levelling may then have come to a standstill under conditions which are utterly unknown to us..." (Scherer 1941:11)

"It is well established that some assibilation of Germanic k occurred in Northumberland as in other dialects of English, but the extent to which non-initial k was affect has remained open to question. A study of the complete place-name material indicates that in the north of Engliand k was retained as a stop in final position. In the county of Northumberland only, medial k was assibilated before i/j, and in the sequence -ik- + palatal vowel; elsewhere in the North medial k was in all situations retained as a stop." (Watson 1947:43)

"...For Northumberland only, then, Luick's hypothesis regarding medial k applies: in the sequence -ik- + palatal vowel, as well as in the sequence -ki-/-kj-, the consonant shifted to the č phoneme and was eventually assibilated. (Watson 1947:48)

"As indicated above, inherited *-anti ordinarily results in -anza; the lack of assibilation and retention of final i in these vocatives in -anti must thus in some way reflect the unusual phonological environment of vocatives, and will ultimately help determine precisely the conditioning of the development *-ti > z /ts/." (Garrett 1990:275)

References:

• Garrett, Andrew. (1990). The origin of NP split ergativity. Language, 66 (2), 261-296.
• Scherer, Philip. (1941). Language dissertation no. 32: Germanic-Balto-Slavic etyma. Language, 17 (1), 5-63.
• Sturtevant, E. H. (1926). On the position of Hittite among the Indo-European languages. Language, 2 (1), 25-34.
• Watson, John W., Jr. (1947). Non-Initial k in the North of England. Language, 23 (1), 43-49.

– ishwar  (speak) 19:35, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

correction or precision

Concerning the section "romance language", at the end it is said that the french for suffix -tion is pronounced /sjə/ what is simply wrong since the pronunciation is /sjɔ̃(n)/. The letter o in french may correspond either /o/, /ɔ/, /u/ with digram ou, /ɔ̃/ with digrams on and om or more rarely /ø/ or /œ/ with the digram œu (which tend to take over the schwa /ə/ in french) but this last case could anyway not happen here because of the nasalization of the o. The facts that the affricate /t͡s/ get reduced to /s/ by lenition and that then /sj/ palatalizes in english to /ʃ/ is correct and so ok but the rest has to be either justified by any references on this point or rewrited because it sounds like imagination or unknowing. Acidvenom (talk) 18:28, 6 July 2012 (UTC)