Again, not necessarily a "problem", but a case that needs to be considered.

(And vowel contraction is covered in the article on hiatus I linked to above.)

Oops, my bad! I did not see the hiatus link, but I have read it and have read the sandhi link around six times now.


*I didn't know what else to call the situation, so I used "problem".*

This "case" needs to be addressed because the end vowel and the start vowel form a diphthong without being in the same syllable, correct?

So hiatus is when there are two vowels in adjacent syllable and is called diphthong when the vowels are in the same syllable. I don't think I would like handling the situation/case by giving it a rule to add an extra consonant, and I wouldn't want to delete a vowel, so avoidance is out. So I can use any of those hiatus rules? I guess diaeresis or epenthesis (glide) is the best for my conlang. To be sure I understand, may I ask if they would function like this:

Diaeresis = hena/ä o/öskal
Epenthesis (glide) = hena(/w/y/) oskal

Still not sure about sandhi. I'll keep looking around and reading, see if I can understand it. So far I think sandhi is when you put a consonant (which can be ignored in written form?) in. :/

Yep, that's glide epenthesis.


No, that's epenthesis. Sandhi is a more general term. It covers all kinds of effects which extend over word boundaries. Here's another example:

In Spanish, the voiced stops (i.e. /b/, /d/, /g/) are weakened to approximants when they occur between two vowels (or between a vowel and certain consonants). This happens not only in the middle of words but also at the beginning.

For instance:

1. nada mas "nothing more" > ['nað̞a'mas̺]
2. la dama "the lady" > [la'ð̞ama]

In the first case, the /d/ is in the middle of a word. In the second case, it's at the beginning of a word, but it still comes between two vowels. In both cases, the allophone used is the approximant.

Now compare:

1. aldaba "latch" > [al'd̪aβ̞a]
2. cual dama "which lady" > ['kwal'd̪ama]

In both cases, /d/ immediately follows /l/, so it's the plosive allophone that is present. Again, it doesn't matter that in the first case, /l/ and /d/ both belong to the same word whereas in the second, the /l/ belongs to one word and the /d/ belongs to another. This phonological rule ignores word boundaries.

I'm terribly sorry for the super late reply! My (new) Nortons anti-virus software wouldn't allow me on the site and then wouldn't let me log in for some strange reason.


Awesome! Is that why Meijer has /j/...? I think my mother mentioned something like this years ago.

Hmm, with a bit more thought on the matter, I also like the idea of deleting a vowel in the case. I've read the article once more to be sure of myself (the avoidance part). When it says "by deleting a vowel" (Elision?), it would function like so:

Hena oskal > Hen oskal

right? Does Diaeresis work like so: hena/ä o/öskal ?


So sandhi, as simply as I can word it, is more like a forum (under a category) and all the effects are sub-forums of it? Probably not the best example.

Don't stress! This isn't homework, this is a hobby; you get to it when you get to it.


No, Meijer is a German adaptation of Latin major. Even though this was spelled MAIOR in the Classical orthography, we can be pretty sure the I always represented a glide because the reconstructed protoform is *magjos.

A better example might be a word like buyer. The root is /bai/ and the suffix is /ər/, but when they come together, the result is ['baɩ̯jɚ], with a glide in the middle. (At least for most speakers.)


That's one possibility. You need to work out the details: Is it always the first vowel that's deleted/elided, or is it sometimes the second? If it's sometimes the second, then what are the conditions? Is there a definite hierarchy, with some vowel (e.g. /a/) always being elided, some vowel (e.g. /i/) never being elided, and the others falling in-between?

It's also not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can combine rules so, for instance, /a/ is deleted next to /e/ or /o/ but retained after /i/, and when /a/ comes before /i/, they form /e/.


"Diaeresis" is term from prosody and punctuation. I would rather speaking of "preserving hiatus". You don't need any special diacritic to indicate this.


That's a reasonable way to think of it.

Definitely not homework.



Oh, thanks for the example! wish I knew some German, might have made all the examples a lot easier to grasp.



I was going to say sometimes the second, but then I thought I wouldn't quite like that.

What do you mean by falling in-between?

Hmm, for now I like first/second always being elided (haven't picked which yet) or combing the rules. :p


Ah, okay then.


I guess I grasp it all better with examples I'm good at.

I mean say you have four vowels: /a/, /e/, /o/ /i/. And you arrange them in a hierarchy from weakest (/a/) to strongest (/i/). /e/ and /o/ can be said to "fall between" those two endpoints.

It's a shame it's not easier to do tables here, since that would make this example more readily intelligible. But it works like this:

If /a/ comes next to /e/, /o/, or /i/, it gets elided.
If /e/ comes next to /o/ or /i/, it gets elided; otherwise it stays.
If /o/ comes next to /i/, it gets elides; otherwise it stays.
/i/ always stays; the vowel next to it is always elided.

That's a hierarchy. It's by no means the only one possible and, like I said, vowels can be elided in some cases and merge or form glides in others.

Ah! I understand what you meant now.

I think I'll go with elision on the first vowel in the situation. Would I write the rule like the empenthesis rule, or could I just write it in word?

I noticed the forum doesn't allow editing or anything like that. I hope the admin makes it possible to edit, make tables and fixes the code BBCode because it keeps messing up on me.

(*
I have a question that I forgot to elaborate myself on a page or two back about something spanick had said. When he was explaining how to write the empathetic rule (Ø → V / C ____ C), he said it was, the rule, only possible if the word was prefixed to another. Is it possible to have both rules present? Because in this case, I wouldn't want the words to always be prefixed/attached to one another. So I was curious if this could be done?

I would write the two rules thusly:

⃠ -> V | #_CC
V -> ⃠ | _V

# is used to represent a word boundary. So the first rule says that it a word starts with two consonants, a vowel is added before the first one to form a new syllable.

The second rule simply says that a vowel is deleted when it comes before another vowel, regardless of where this is.

Thanks for writing out the rules, linguoboy!
*and the first rule with the word boundary # can be split, correct? *


Regardless of where it is...?

*Well my friend and I have come to a tough spot. She doesn't want elision, I do. She wants epenthesis (using a glide) or avoidance by adding another consonant in the hiatus situation, or just nothing I think (not sure about the last, she suddenly signed off in the middle of a chat lol). So it looks like we'll be messing with the hiatus thing for a bit...*