New languages, and new views on old ones....

I had a bit of a realisation this morning about English, and it's all thanks to Corsican.  Corsican tends to weaken certain vowels when they're unstressed.  So marking the stressed vowel with bold type, "accende" (the infinitive to light or enflame) becomes "accindite" (present, 2nd person plural).  And this happens with almost all Es.  Almost.  Note the unstressed E at the end of both accende and accindite.  But these unstressed Es only seem to occur where they have a specific grammatical purpose -- as far as I can tell any other E becomes I.

Now in certain parts these vowel "mutations" don't occur, but the majority dialects tend to do it.  The odd thing, then, is that vowel mutation happens even though speakers of the language are evidently capable of saying the "forbidden" sound.  Why not say it if you can?

Well, somewhere along the line, I started thinking about English, and in particular the prefixes pre- and re-.

There's two pronunciations for each: one with schwa and one with /i/.  The schwa occurs wherever the syllable has no stress, normally adjacent to the primary stressed syllable -- eg "report", "reply" -- and the /ri/ pronunciation when it has secondary stress.  So that's an "ee" sound, like a Corsican "I".  It never seems to have an "eh" sound, like a Corsican "E".

And no matter how much I try to, I can't think of a single word in English with the "eh" of "pedal" and "petal" anywhere but in the position of primary stress.

Unless your American, in which case it occurs everywhere.

And that's what I'd never noticed before -- I always thought of the US "reh"-produce as though it was something specific to the re- prefix, but it's a bit more fundamental than that, isn't it...?

Initial observations about Corsican

Before I came here, I did a bit of digging about on the internet, trying to find out about the Corsican language.  There wasn't hellish much info in English, and even in French it was pretty sketchy.  Now I'm here, though, and I've picked up a book of Corsican grammar (in Corsican, just for the hell of it) so I can start to puzzle it out for myself.

My first reaction from some of the free resources online was to describe Corsican as "Italian with a Catalan accent", because of the vowel reduction in unstressed syllables.  However, vowel reduction in Corsican is not as extreme as that in Catalan.

One thing that wasn't described too well in the sources I'd viewed online was consonant changes, and in reality it isn't particularly difficult.  I'd been trying to puzzle through single and double consonants, and my initial reaction was to treat them as in Italian, where a double consonant is lengthened (a process called "gemination".  But the first pronunciation guides talked about consonant changes -- a T being pronounced as D for example.

As it turns out, in the south the model is more like Italian -- T is /t/ and TT is /tt/ -- and in the north these changes occur, but even these aren't alien to someone familiar with other Romance languages.  It's a process called "lenition" (the weakening of consonants) and it happens frequently in many peninsular Spanish dialects (the archetypical example being the word "Madrid" in a Madrid accent) as well as in almost all other dialects in the letter V.  A consonant is weakened with it occurs "intervocalically" (ie between two vowels).  The strong form occurs when bounded on one side by another consonant.  And if there's no other consonant, just doubling the same consonant gets round the problem (which is roughly analogous with the R/RR distinction in Spanish and several other languages).

So in the north of Corsica "atta" would be pronounced /'ata/, "ata" would be pronounced /'ada/ (as would "adda") and "ada" would be pronounced /'aða/ -- which is the same soft D as in Madrid (/ma'drið/).

So Corsican is just another point on the spectrum of Romance languages.  The interesting part is how the north and south have such different ways of rendering the same consonants, but that in so many respects the northern and southern dialects are extremely similar and consistent.  Before starting on Corsican, I would have assumed that such a large difference in pronunciation would have broken mutual comprehensibility and that the dialects would have diverged to the point of being considered completely distinct languages, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

The weirdness of learning something you already "know"...

I've started looking at starting on Corsican a few times, but it's always seemed really difficult.  Why?  Because all the beginners' stuff looks too obvious to me to be worth looking at.  If it's not like Italian, it's like Spanish or French.  Everything I'd found was phrase-based, and I could understand most of them with no effort.  My brain saw no reason for effort.

That's something I find quite interesting, because I've always argued that extrinsic motivation (motivation from outside the material/course) is not enough -- all teaching has to be intrinsically motivating.

Well, today I came across a slightly better site (for French speakers).  The lessons there aren't brilliant, as they're just information and the exercises on the site aren't related to the lessons.

But the information's there, so I can juggle it about to suit myself.

Maybe it's time to dive back into the Python NLTK and write myself a wee bit of self-teaching software....