Opacity

Opacity

adapted from a March 19, 1997 post by Dirk A Elzinga

On Wed, 19 Mar 1997, Mr B.Philip.Jonsson [Seeker of Useless Knowledge] wrote:

Strangely something similar exists in proto-Wanic (that's the proto-lang of my horrenduosly sophisticated too-complex-ever-to-be-completed art-lang-family -- [art[lang[family]]], NOT [[art[lang]]family] :-).
PW has long, short and over-short vowels. The latter cont as vowels in some phonological processes, involving syllabication and coloring of adjacent consonants, but are completely disregarded in processes involving stress placement, and variably accounted for in cases of syncopation and stress shift in the daughter languages. The quirk is that PW stress placement historically and logically precedes those other processes where the over-short vowels DO count...

This sounds very interesting; if these processes are synchronic, they may well be the first examples of opacity in constructed languages! Opacity refers to the elimination of environments which trigger phonological processes, leaving one with the impression that some kind of exception to the rules is involved, much as the Hebrew case that ~mark described, where spirantization of stops occurs even though there aren't vowels on the surface to trigger it. (I provided a quicky analysis in my previous post.) Can you provide examples from Proto-Wanic?

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