Talk:Ablaut

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Contents 1 move 1.1 disagreement 2 Quick-and-dirty quantification 3 Kwami's 2 bits 4 What about Umlaut?

[edit] move

moved what was previously here to Indo-European ablaut since only IE ablaut was discussed.

Ablaut now redirects to Apophony, but ablaut is a much more common term, so maybe Apophony should be moved to Ablaut.

peace – ishwar  (speak) 21:07, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] disagreement

Sorry, Ishwar, but this should not have been done without discussion. The reason only IE ablaut was discussed is because in its primary meaning the word ablaut only means IE ablaut. Apophany is the general term for the phenomenon in all languages, Ablaut is the specific term for this historical incidence of it. I know some people are sloppy about that, but if we reduce all terms to their least precise usage we end up with nothing meaning anything at all, so if we have two terms and two concepts we should keep the distinction. And this one is a good one. SO: I don't mind you renaming the article Indo-European Ablaut for the sake of clarity, but Ablaut should redirect there, not to Apophony. --Doric Loon 22:47, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

hi. ablaut does not refer only to IE ablaut. ablaut is the general term. apophony is not as common as ablaut. – ishwar  (speak) 23:34, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion Ablaut, rather than a redirect, should be a disambiguation page with references to Indo-European ablaut and Apophony. --teb728 10:06, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I think you are wrong about that Ishwar. But even if you are partly right, you cannot go ahead with this change now, because dozens of other articles have links to Ablaut which are meant to be pointing to the article on IE ablaut, and if you do what you want to, they will all be pointing to the wrong place. You would have to fix them all first. Apart from that, can you please explain to me what the merit is in having four terms (ablaut, apophony, gradation and alteration) and using them all in a woolly way to mean the same two (or more) things? I know people often use terms vaguely by analogy, but most linguists try to be more precise than that. And as I say, I think you are mistaken to see ablaut as the preferred term of serious linguists when speaking about non-IE languages. I could, possibly, go along with TEB728's suggestion as a compromise, though as people looking for Ablaut will in 99% of cases be looking for IE Ablaut, I don't really see the point in not letting that reference at the top of IE Ablaut serve as the disambig. --Doric Loon 12:30, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

a disambig page would be kinda weird: these are not 2 different topics but rather one is the topic as restricted to a certain language family. it makes more sense to treat a general description & then to have links to more specific topics. this is the way other articles here (& elsewhere) work.

if all articles dealing with IE ablaut point to Ablaut, then this is expected (is it not?). if a link is needed to the specific topic, then a link should be added.

apophony is a translation of German ablaut. there exist many equivalent terms dealing with language, such as theta-role/semantic role/thematic role, point of articulation/place of articulation, approximant/frictionless continuant, voiceless/surd, weakening/lenition, variety/lect, control structure/equi-NP deletion, matrix-coding construction/raising construction, etc. it is not our job to redefine terms, but to use the most often-used sense of the word (unless there is no most oft used sense).

i dont ask to simply take my word for it. however, i do encourage you to give a look at various reference materials and/or ling journals. if you dont want to, then i'll cite several sources supporting my position. if people are looking for IE ablaut 99% of the time, perhaps this is because they do not know about ablaut in non-IE langs, which makes it more convincing (to me) that they be mentioned in an article on ablaut. peace – ishwar  (speak) 14:47, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Hi. Sorry, I don't understand your second point ("this is expected"). It is certainly good to have people discover the broader topic, and your initiative on the Apophony page is great: well done. Needs more work, of course, but that will come. I agree with you that we don't want to redefine terms. But when terms have a narrower and a wider use, there is a lot to be said for sticking to the narrower one, especially when there are other terms to choose from. That increases precision and does not involve original input. I will do as you suggest and look in a wider range of text books. But the ones I have certainly support my position. Have you ever seen a Hebrew grammar refer to Ablaut? The text books we used when I learned Hebrew at university more years ago than I like to think DID speak of apohony. --Doric Loon 15:02, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

i meant that since Indo-European ablaut is about ablaut in IE langs then it should be expected that that article will link to a more general article (i.e. ablaut/apophony).

i think that since the term ablaut is used to refer to ablaut in any language family having an article about ablaut that describes only IE langs is not acceptable. you are suggesting a redefinition of the term (i.e. having it refer only to IE langs).

i have never looked at a grammar of Hebrew, so i cant comment on this (although i've seen refer to Arabic). even if you have read a particular grammar of a non-IE lang that uses the term apophony and not the term ablaut, this does not mean that the term ablaut cannot not have been used in that grammar (this is an just editorial preference). i have seen the term ablaut used with respect to Athabascan langs, Yokutsan langs, Otomanguean langs, Cushitic langs, Semitic langs, Utian langs, Siouan langs, & Kartvelian langs. – ishwar  (speak) 15:37, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Ishwar, I cannot believe you have reverted this again without addressing the issues. You are being very irresponsible. IF YOU MOVE AN ARTICLE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR FIXING ALL LINKS. You have moved the Ablaut article and now you are making Ablaut redirect somewhere else, which means that about forty links point the wrong place. IT IS YOUR JOB TO FIX THESE and you should have done it before you changed the redirect. ALSO, if you are going to make Apophony the first point of entry into the topic, you had better first upgrade it from a stub to a completed article. When you have done that, we can talk about where the redirect goes. Until you do it, the redirect MUST point to the IE article. --Doric Loon 15:31, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

i dont understand why the links need to be fixed. if they refer to ablaut & link to a page about ablaut, why do they need to link to more specific page? you can add the specific page to the See Also section. hopefully, everyone will work on the article to make it more than a stub. i cant help that the topic has not been addressed until now. peace – ishwar  (speak) 15:45, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

If ishwar cannot agree to a compromise, then I must agree with Doric Loon: Before we can CONSIDER redirecting to Apophony, the links MUST be fixed. And the Apophony article really should be made more complete. Until that is done, the reference at the top of Indo-European ablaut will direct users the more general article if that is what they want. I frankly favor that as a permanent solution (since my suggestion was rejected). --teb728 20:35, 17 November 2005 (UTC) (retraction --teb728 08:33, 23 November 2005 (UTC))

The reason why the links have to be fixed is that the purpose of many of them - probably most of them - is not just to explain the meaning of "ablaut" but rather to explain how it works in the Indo-European context; they provide necessary background explanations for articles on Germanic verbs and the likes. And quite a few of them direct to sub-sections, like: ablaut#the zero grade - which used to work, and still does if the redirect is operational, but doesn't do anything at all if the redirect points to a different article. I have now fixed about 15 links in articles which are important to me, so they point directly to Indo-European ablaut, but I have no intention of doing any more: it's a long, slow job. --Doric Loon 21:58, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

User:teb728: whether or not I want to compromise & whether or not I reject your suggestion should be not be used as a criterion for determining what is most appropriate. I dont think that the links necessarily need to be fixed as Doric Loon has suggested, but perhaps they do need to be addressed depending on the content of a given article (see my next paragraph).

User:Doric Loon: I would imagine that most (if not all articles) should have a link to the general ablaut article (as a quick explanation of what it is before delving into more detailed description). In addition to this link, if this article makes a reference to Indo-European ablaut, then adding another link to Indo-European ablaut would be very appropriate. So, I am suggesting that these articles have 2 links: one to ablaut and one to Indo-European ablaut. However, if an editor chooses not to link to ablaut but only to Indo-European ablaut because of the particular content of an article, then that would also be very appropriate. At any rate, the choice will be governed by the article's content. If find the process long and slow, then, of course, you dont need make the edits. Please do something enjoyable. Anyone on the internet can now read this and make those edits.

for everyone: I have surveyed a little bit of the literature showing different definitions of ablaut, apophony, & related terms: Talk:Ablaut/references. Only one reference seems to say that ablaut applies to IE langs, but his definition (actually a translation of his definition) is not really all that clear. Matthews seems to suggest that ablaut applies to Germanic langs & vowel alternation applies to IE langs. Otherwise, the terms are synonymous. An exception here is Bauer (2004) who states that ablaut refers mostly to vowels within verbs, while apophony can encompass alternations involving consonants as well (better to just read what he says). But, I will personally attest that I have seen ablaut used to refer to consonant alternations (you can even search Google for this). Perhaps, Bauer's (2004) definitions are useful for Wikipedia? Let me know what you think. peace – ishwar  (speak) 01:01, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

See User:Thincat’s contribution to Talk:Indo-European_ablaut#Technical?. He started wanting to know about English irregular verbs. He stumbled from there to Strong verb to Germanic verb and somehow wound up at Ablaut (when it meant Indo-European ablaut). Imagine his confusion if he had been redirected to Apophony! He probably would never have found his way to Indo-European ablaut (not that that was where he needed to go anyway). The real problem is that other articles show just your kind of erroneous thinking—routing a user to the general when he wants the specific. You or I of course could probably find our way to the specific because we know what we are looking for, but we should not inflict a general article on a naïve reader. Rather we should offer him a link from the specific article to the general in case he is interested.

I see now that I wrong to propose a disambiguation page, and Doric Loon is 100% correct. Please reread my previous comment with that in mind.

If you find merit in your idea of including both general and specific links in articles feel free to do so. (I frankly see no merit it.) Even so in most cases the general link should be under "See also" rather in the body of the article. But until you have changed ALL the PIE-related Ablaut links to point to Indo-European ablaut, do not THINK of redirecting Ablaut to Apophony. --teb728 08:10, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Ishwar, for the references you put up at Talk:Ablaut/references: it is always good to work with definite sources. However, these sources really only substantiate what I was saying. While several of them note woollier uses of the terms, they all either give the narrower IE (or Germanic) reference as the primary meaning of Ablaut or leave the impression of not being terribly enthusiastic about the word Ablaut at all. Those who are specifically interested in comparisons outwith the IE group prefer either apophany or gradation. I think we can all agree with you that Ablaut IS sometimes used in a broad sense, and it is right that Apophany should note it as an alternative term, but the mainstream position is basically "Ablaut = gradation/apophany in IE". --Doric Loon 11:44, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Bauer's definition which makes ablaut refer mainly to verbs is correct for synchronic studies: if we are only interested in how the language works now, the relation between sing and sang is important, while the relation between foot and Latin pes is less important. That's why people working with modern languages hear the word and think first of Germanic strong verbs. For a historical linguist, there is no such bias - in PIE the phenomenon was not particularly a verb thing. For that reason I wouldn't quote Bauer in the article without adding a caveat. --Doric Loon 11:51, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

hi. I dont understand your reading of the references. Only one source says that ablaut is used in Germanic & one other source seems to suggest that ablaut is used in IE (although it is not clear what he means when he mentions apophony). All of the other references do not suggest that ablaut is used for only IE langs. One source explicitly states that ablaut is not used for only IE langs (this is Bauer 2003). I cannot read the references & get an interpretation that ablaut primarily refers to IE stem alternation. The references clearly indicate a usage where the term applies to all langs including both IE & non-IE. Apophony is Latinate translation of German ablaut; they are synonymous with the exception that Bauer 2004 indicates that apophony can be used for non-vowel stem alternation.

re Bauer 2004: i wasnt clear before. what i was thinking may be a useful distinction was Bauer's (2004) statement that apophony often is used to refer consonantal alternation whereas ablaut typically deals with vocalic alternation. i have seen the terms consonantal ablaut or consonant ablaut, but i agree with Bauer that these are less common. if we follow Bauer in this respect, then we can have (1) an article on Apophony which treats all types of stem alternation, (2) an article on Ablaut which treats only vocalic alternation. and of course, we already have Indo-European ablaut which treats vocalic alternation in only a specific language family. But, as we know (& as Bauer 2004 writes) the term apophony is also used to refer to only vocalic alternation & is thus synonymous with ablaut. – ishwar  (speak) 15:58, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it's quite clear that for most linguists ablaut and apophony are complete synonyms and therefore there should just be one article between them, with a redirect from the other term. I also think that of the two, ablaut is the more common term, so the article should be there, and apophony should redirect to ablaut. Since ablaut is not a purely Indo-European phenomenon, ablaut should be a general article, and discussion of ablaut as it's reconstructed for PIE and attested in modern IE languages should be at Indo-European ablaut. It is true that some linguistics dictionaries define ablaut as being specifically Indo-European; however, this seems to be done out of ignorance of or apathy for the fact that non-Indo-European languages also have vowel gradation. Tellingly, no one who defines ablaut as specifically Indo-European has a broader definition of apophony; everyone treats the two as absolute synonyms. --User:Angr/talk 16:08, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I notice that you and kwami below both understand ablaut/apophany as meaning vowel gradation. I think that an important part of the general article (whatever it is called) is that it should include both vowel gradation and consonant gradation. What should such an article be called? In my experience (and apparently yours and kwami's), ablaut does not include consonant gradation. --teb728 23:33, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Quick-and-dirty quantification

Ish_ishwar asked me to weigh in on this issue. Being mostly acquainted with African languages and linguistics, I can confirm that the term ablaut, regardless of its historic (IE) origins, is used today in a wider sense — for instance, I frequently come across it in the context of Afro-Asiatic languages. But rather than bringing only my anecdotic evidence, I've decided to sample a few databases of linguistic publications to see how ablaut and apophony are used in academic linguistics.

Searching for 'ablaut' in title in the CSA Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts database returns 41 hits, of which 9 are non-IE. A similar search in the bibliographical database of linguistics returns 48 hits, of which about 10 concern non-IE languages. The overall numbers are quite low, of course, because I only searched within titles. Regardless, I think we can draw two conclusions: (1) 'ablaut' is used widely in IE linguistics, (2) it is also a common term in the linguistic tradition of some other phyla. It is important to note that the body of IE linguistics as a whole is many times larger than that of many other phylogenetic subfields, so that when we find seven out of forty hits relating to Native American languages this means that use of ablaut in NA linguistics is quite common actually.

Apophony is, according to my searches, only marginally used compared to ablaut. Perhaps surprisingly, its use seems to be mainly confined to IE linguistics. CSA/LLBA yields only nine results, of which eight pertain to IE languages (and one to Afro-Asiatic Bilin). BL Online yields three results, of which two are about IE languages. Conclusion: if we take a usage-based perspective, apophony is definitely not the general term; ablaut is. And the latter one is used commonly in non-IE contexts.

For Wikipedia practice this means, I think, that we should have a general article at Ablaut, one that is not confined to IE languages. Of course that article should mention the original scope of the term. And apophony is probably better of as a redirect to Ablaut. — mark ✎ 17:47, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Kwami's 2 bits

First of all, on principal, linguistics articles shouldn't promote topics as language-specific phenomena when they aren't, implying that certain families are priveledged in our conception over others. Treating vowel gradation in one family as 'ablaut' while vowel gradation in all other families is 'apophony' because it isn't "real" ablaut would be like limiting the 'religion' article to 'Christianity', because Buddhism, Islam, etc. aren't "real" religions.

Apophony is the less common of the two terms. It appears to be a Greek calque of German ablaut (ab- → apo-; laut → phon). Why we need a Greek word I don't know. Maybe we should only use ablaut to refer to German, apophony for Greek, and sound gradation for English? We could then invent new terms for other languages as we come across them.

[I'm being facetious!]

Here's what the OED has on apophony:

Variation in vowel quality in the formation of grammatically related words, as in Eng. give, gave, G. sprechen, sprach. (Also called ablaut and vowel gradation.)

1883 I. SYDOW German Convers.-Gram. 253 The Germans call this..Ablaut, that may be rendered by apophony.

1894 V. HENRY Compar. Gram. Eng. & Ger. 358 Mod. German, though keeping the apophony, obscures it by borrowing the metaphony from the subjunctive.

For ablaut, they have

Vowel permutation; systematic passage of the root vowel into others in derivation, as in sing, sang, song, sung, apart from the phonetic influence of a succeeding vowel as in umlaut.

with examples going back to 1849.

Arlotto, in his Introduction to Historical Linguistics, uses Indo-European as his exemplar language family. In the main chapter on Indo-European historical linguistics, he has a section on apophony, where he discusses Indo-European vowel gradation (Latin ped ~ Greek pod, etc.). He says,

Indo-European possessed a flourishing system of apophony. Apophony, also called ablaut or vowel gradation, is a collection of processes whereby meanings and functions of roots are indicated by altering the quality of the root vowel [...]

Apophony is very productive iin any number of the world's languages. Let us take an example from Semitic. [...]

He then talks about English sing sang sung and the IE e ~ o ~ Ø grades as apophony.

Arlotto's from Harvard, where they're big on Indo-European.

Personally, I would prefer the main article on vowel gradation to be called either 'vowel gradation' or 'ablaut', with apophony as a redirect. Whichever article it is, it should link to the article on IE apophony, perhaps as a disambig at the top. As for the links, well, if the authors of some articles were sloppy, then they should fix their articles. If dozens of articles linking to 'religion' really intended 'Christianity', should we be prevented from moving the contents of the religion article to 'Christianity' until all the links were fixed?

kwami 20:25, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Your ‘religion’ example is not appropriate to the case at hand; here are a couple of examples which are more appropriate: Suppose that several articles linked to Trinity to mean the Christian Trinity, and someone decided to generalize the article to include the Hindu Trimurti, the Triple Goddess Brigid, and others. Or suppose that the article on Fundamentalism originally had been written to mean ‘Protestant Christian Fundamentalism,’ and that several articles linked to it in that sense, and suppose that it had only later been generalized to a comparative religion viewpoint. Ablaut is a particularly difficult subject because in an IE context it has a technical meaning of e/ē/o/ō/ø gradation, specifically excluding ‘umlaut.’ --teb728 23:08, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't know that it has a narrower definition in IE so much as it has a narrower implication due to the IE context. E/ē/o/ō/ø gradation is simply the realization of ablaut in IE, whereas umlaut is (historically at least) regressive assimilation, and therefore fundamentally distinct. Ablaut has a specific meaning in Afroasiatic as well, but again that's due to the details of the languages it's being applied to, rather than to a specialized definition. kwami 01:40, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Do I understand correctly that for the purpose of a general article you do not include umlaut as a form of apophony/ablaut/sound gradation (whatever the general article is to be called)? If so, I am surprised. I am fully in favor of a general article like what is being created at Apophony – including both vowel gradation (including umlaut) and consonant gradation. The body of the article should consider IE vowel gradation first (because that is what most users will be looking for), giving links to Indo-European ablaut and Germanic umlaut and/or I-mutation for details. I question two things: 1. What should the article be called? You and Angr (above) seem to regard ablaut as vowel gradation (as opposed to consonant gradation) so ‘Ablaut’ would be too specific a title. 2. If the article is not called Ablaut, should Ablaut redirect to the general article rather than to Indo-European ablaut? I say no. --teb728 04:06, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I imagine that, synchronically, most umlaut is ablaut, because it's no longer phonologically determined. English foot/feet is equivalent to give/gave. In the diachronic context of IE historical linguistics, it's not counted because it once was phonologically determined. But I don't see why it shouldn't be covered in a general article on ablaut.

Perhaps ablaut has traditionally been restricted to vowel gradation because that's primarily what goes on with IE languages. Has it now been expanded in the lit to include consonant gradation? If not, I don't know of any word to cover that, just the phrase 'vowel & consonant gradation'. kwami 07:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't know. I do know there is some discussion of consonant gradation at consonant mutation, though. --Angr (t·c) 14:38, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

re umlaut: The term umlaut as used in a historical context is often unclear: what they mean is "type of ablaut resulting from historical umlaut process". So, yes, this would be ablaut. The other meaning of umlaut is "(synchronic) regressive V assimilation", i.e. not a type of ablaut. The general article should discuss historical umlaut, but not synchronic umlaut.

re general article and Vs & Cs: My impression is that ablaut prototypically involves vowels. I think that the references I typed up vaguely (?) suggest this. I have seen the term consonantal ablaut, but I think that I would always see that consonantal has to added to specify that vocalic ablaut is not being discussed. This is too bad since it would be useful to have a term commonly used to cover anything including both vowels & consonants. As I wrote above, Bauer (2004) seems to think that apophony is sometimes used in this all inclusive sense (but I dont really know about this myself). Following Sapir, Haspelmath (2002), Matthews (1991), and also The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1994) use a term including the word modification, i.e. base modification, internal modification, stem modification. Anyway, it does seem appropriate to me (& also to other authors) to treat all of these alternations/modifications in a general sense. Because of our unfortunate terminology problem, we have some ignore a traditional term like ablaut in favor base modification. My question above hasnt been answered yet: Is it objectionable to follow Bauer and define apophony as the general consonant/vowel term? Or should we limit ourselves to ablaut & define it as applying only to vowels & point to consonant mutation for the consonant counterpart? (We can, of course, note the other uses in the article.) To restate my questions: Should we only 2 articles divided between vowels (ablaut) & consonants (consonant mutation)? Or should we have 3 articles divided between general (apophony or internal modification or whatever), vowels (ablaut), consonants (consonant mutation)? Or should we do something else? (hope this makes sense) – ishwar  (speak) 06:16, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What about Umlaut?

Just a question: For those of you who want to use the word Ablaut to mean all grammatically significant vowel alterations, would you include Umlaut as a subcategory of Ablaut? That would seem to me to be the logical consequence of this broadening. After all, the vowel gradations in Indo-European and in Semitic are so very different that a term which means both is inevitably a catch-all, and it would be difficult then to exclude other phenomena if they are even vaguely analogous. But for Indo-European linguistics, especially for Germanic, that would be disasterous. It would result in a confusion of two things which people too often confuse anyway, and which we have to work SO hard to disambiguate in the minds of our students. --Doric Loon 14:18, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

it would depend on what you mean by Umlaut. If you mean vowel assimilation, then this is not a subtype of ablaut. If you mean a grammatical vowel alternation that developed historically because of a previous vowel assimilation process which is no longer active because the trigger of the assimilation disappeared, then this is a subtype of ablaut. These different meanings are not made clear in many writings. Yes, too bad for the students! I think that we would want a "catch-all" that caught all of the vowel alternations in every language. Semitic langs are different, and they are analyzed in different ways (not everyone considers Semitic patterns to be "alternations"; one other considers them "transfixes", i.e. discontinuous affixes). peace – ishwar  (speak) 06:58, 25 November 2005 (UTC)