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A persistent rule in Maltese1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2017

William Cowan
William Cowan*
Affiliation:
Carleton University
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Extract

The Notion of persistent rule in historical phonology has been discussed by Chafe in his important asticle on the order of phonological rules (Chafe 1968). Two examples are the wellknown devoicing of final obstruants in German - a rule added to the grammar of German at a point in time in its history, and still operative so that words introduced after the adding of the rule are subject to it; and the loss of final /n/ in Livonian, so that a word like /nainen/ first becomes /naine/, then is subject to a rule that eliminates final vowels, thus becoming /nain/, which, since the n-dropping rule is still in force, becomes /nai/. Rules are said to persist when they apply either to forms resulting from rules added later than they to the grammar of the language, or to forms introduced into the language from a source other than a later rule, i.e. through borrowing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Spring 1970 , pp. 122 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1970

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank J. K. Chambers for reading the manuscript of this article and making many valuable suggestions.

References

Chafe, Wallace, “The ordering of phonological rules,” IJAL 34. 115–36 (1968).Google Scholar
Sutcliffe, E. F., A grammar of the Maltese language.3 Valletta: 1960.Google Scholar
Dessoulavy, C. L., A Maltese-Arabic word list. London: 1938.Google Scholar
Barbera, D. Giuseppe, Dizionario Maltese-Arabo-Italiano. Beirut: 1939.Google Scholar
Busuttil, E. D., Kalepin (Dizjunarju) Malti-Ingliż. Valletta: 1949.Google Scholar
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De Soldanis, G., Nuova scuola di grammatica per agevolmente apprendere la lingua Punica-Maltese. Rome: 1750.Google Scholar