PhDniX's blog

Bizarre Milk

Sometimes you run into a language that has undergone a sound shift that is completely transparent, but at the same time phonetically completely absurd.

One such a sound shift is the shift of Proto-Berber *əβ > Northern Berber *i. Tashelhiyt and Middle Atlas Berber underwent *əβ > *u.

More peripheral berber languages have retained the phoneme *β like Augila and Ghadamès. The Touareg languages generally retain it as h.

Both these shifts are clear, as an example I'll use the word for 'milk'.

PB *aγəβ  Augila aγəβ, aγf; Ahaggar ăx; Kabyle iγi; Riffian aγi; Middle-Atlas aγu; Tashelhiyt aγu; Ouargla aγi

This word is somewhat strange in Ahaggar (a Touareg language) as it did not retain the *β as h or even the second syllable at all. One can imagine that *ăxh yielded *ăxx to eventually get shortened to ăx though , but it's not exactly regular.

But as you can see, the small selection of Northern-Berber language clearly shows a perfect proof for the shift *əβ > *i. And citing more examples would simply give more convincing proof for this shit. But now the question is, how on earth does this work?

*β has a labial element so the Middle-Atlas and Tashelhiyt reflexes can be understood as coloring of the schwa to *ŭ and then getting lengthened to *u by compensatory lengething when *β was lost.

Such an explanation of colored vowels can not be used for Northern-Berber though. PB *u is simply reflected as *u in all of them so *əβ did not go through an *u stage before undergoing unrounding to *i. So what if the Proto-Berber sound we *h as found in Touareg rather than *β. We'd get *əh loss of *h could yield compensatory lengthening to *ə̄. As *ə is the high vowel in the short-vowel system, it could be assigned to either of the two high-vowels in the long vowel system.

While the above explanation makes the reflex of Northern-Berber understandable, we've only shifted the problem. Now we are stuck with a shift in Aujila and Ghadamès of *h > β. There's very possiblities to explain such a shift without any conditioning because of rounded/labial vowels in the vincinity.

So there we have it, not a sound correspondence that makes us rethink our theory, but definitely a sound correspondence which is extremely hard to explain phonetically.

fuhshigih na kokjih

towkyo wa yohnen renzok kaubutkah sehkai yicyih de aru

Anyone familiar with the above language? Someone with familiarity with Japanese will probably recognise this as an absurd transcription of the following phrase

東京は四年連続高物価世界一位である

toukyou wa yonen renzoku koubukka sekai ichii de aru

"Tokyo has been the world' s most expensive city for four years running."

The transcription might seem odd, but in 1947 it was adapted to become the official orthography for writing Sino-Japanese (that is Japanese words who are originally from Chinese) at the university of california, and it was even designed to become the official writing system for Japanese.

I picked up this little, extremely polemic, booklet illustrating the UCJ transcription system called

UCJ: An Orthographic System of Notation and Transcription for Sino-Japanese

Written by Peter A. Boodberg in 1947.

It describes, which in this modern age is quite hilarious, how the Japanese script is horribly antiquated and cannot be a viable form of communication in this 'technological age'.

The irony of these words of course that the author was not able to foresee the true wonders of his so esteemed technological age which would fascilitate the Japanese script as a very viable form of communication which has reached even higher literacy levels than it ever did before the technological age.

So why is this transcription method suitable for the modern age anno 1947? It uses in the Latin Alphabet. At this time, there was no reliable and cheap way to write Japanese in its full glory.

An obvious reason why the Japanese have stuck with the Chinese writing up until then, and continue to do so now, is the enormous body of homophones in the Sino-Japanese vocabulary. Boodberg gives a nice list of 6 homophonous bisyllabic words:

草稿 soukou 'manuscript'

操行 soukou 'conduct'

装甲 soukou 'armor'

奏功 soukou 'success'

總攻 soukou 'general attack'

艙口 soukou 'hatchway'

So that's 12 different kanji, brought together giving 6 homophonic compounds. There might be some differences in accent in these compounds, but I'm quite frankly too lazy to look it up.

So it is Boodbergs idea to introduce an etymological spelling. In general the sound ou which is a long /o/ can be derived from several different origins.

*au, *ou, *ang, *ong and *ap

He suggests to write the ou with original *au and *ou as their etymological form, *ang and *ong as aw and ow respectively, and finally *ap as av

This results in 6 unique spelling for the above 6 homophones as

草稿 saukau 'manuscript'

操行 soukaw 'conduct'

装甲 sawkav 'armor'

奏功 soukow 'success'

總攻 sowkow 'general attack'

艙口 sawkou 'hatchway'

A whole bunch of other etymological spellings are added, and all syllable are written with 3 letters in total. It is quite an elegant system that allows a lot of Japanese words to be distinguishable without context, without needing the Chinese characters.

Of course you could ask yourself whether an etymological spelling which may rival the likes of Tibetan and French is preferable to a ideographic script, but it at least needs you to memorize fewer 3 letter combinations than there are Chinese characters.

In a future as Boodberg saw it, with no viable chance to ever get digital chinese writing, it is actually quite an imaginative solution to a big problem in Japanese transcription.

So this UCJ system has become completely outdated? Yes, absolutely, but I am inclined to think that there is still something nice one may pick up from this system.

If one were to learn Japanese, and after that gets a taste for languages with funky characters or with words of Chinese origin and then decides to go out and tackle Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, such an etymological spelling might be very nice for memorisation.

If you learn the Korean pronunciation of Chinese words it is often quite easy to figure out what the Japanese may have been, and both these languages can give you a reasonable hint at Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese.

Of course, there is no need for a true reconstruction of the original pronunciation, but it might be useful to make an abstraction that will help you more accurately predict what the pronunciation of the diferent languages will be.

Has anyone commited such a system to paper? I'm not sure, I do know this is a method is being employed in some sense by Amritas as he has mentioned it in one of his posts once. It's too bad he doesn't rigorously tag his entries for a nice index to help me find it back.

I'm curious to hear from any polyglots of several of these languages if they have ever made use of such a system, or even better, if someone who has learned a bunch of Germanic or Romance languages has ever tried such a thing with the respective families.