More remembrance of times past, recollections triggered by e-mail exchanges between Waynes Browne (at Cornell) and me (at Stanford). The story comes in three parts:
— my 10/12/24 posting “Namesakes and surnamesakes”, which reported on e-mail from WB, the first half of which I riffed on in that posting
— the second half of that e-mail, all about Welsh (recalling our Welsh days at MIT 64 years ago)
— the product of years of my work on the description of Welsh syntax and morphophonology, from only 40 years ago (in a 1984 Chicago Linguistic Society paper)
From my 10/12 posting. About
the second half of WB’s e-mail, which is all about the Welsh language and Welsh popular culture, and which would just look bizarre without some account of how WB and I came to know each other: as grad students together at MIT (back in the early Cretaceous [about 64 years ago]), when I was an assistant teaching a field methods course that happened to be about Welsh, in which WB was a student (a course that kicked off 25 years of work, on and off, with the language for me). But all that will have to come in another posting.
From WB’s 10/9 e-mail. The text:
You also mention Welsh in an old posting. If you remember, the informant for the field-methods course was a Welsh speaker, and you and I worked on a paper about consonant mutations — trying to make them more phonologically conditioned than they are at present [AZ: this effort was in the spirit of Chomsky & Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (1968), then being assembled at MIT].
I’ve been reminded of mutations a couple of times recently. Once was when I was asked to review an article by Welsh terminology-creators that was submitted to a Festschrift for a Croatian terminologist I know. They said “Words that begin with the letter b often mutate to m, for example the b in baban ‘baby’ mutates after the first person singular personal pronoun and this becomes fy maban ‘my baby’. With a term such as biliwn ‘billion’, however, mutation can create confusion as the soft-mutated form of biliwn, miliwn, is the same as the unmutated term miliwn ‘million’. To avoid this potential ambiguity, the agreed-upon convention is that biliwn does not undergo mutation.”
Another time was when I discovered a very stirring Welsh song that still haunts me: “Yma o hyd” ‘We’re still here’, by Dafydd Iwan, now sung by huge crowds at soccer matches. [Despite everything and everyone / We’re still here!] Here’s Iwan himself singing it:
and here’s a singer singing it specially clearly:
and finally here’s an attempt to teach it to English-speakers; note what happens to the mutations when the speaker tries to break down the verses into individual words:
The 1984 CLS paper. “Welsh soft mutation and the case of object NPs” (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1984), which you can view here. The conclusion:
I have argued that neither the Awbery-style nor the Lieber-style treatment of Welsh soft mutation is necessary. There are several viable alternatives [an analysis of soft mutation as a mark of object case and also an analysis with soft mutation as the default for NP-initial words] that are consistent with both pure phrase-structure syntax and the Trigger Constraint. My ulterior motive here is not to give the right answer for Welsh (I do not know what it is), but to draw attention to the possibility of phrase-structure accounts of phenomena that might seem to call for heavier guns.
An elegiac moment. After that 1984 paper, I turned away from Welsh to other things, In 1994 my life began to fall apart, with the onset of my man Jacques’s radiation-caused dementia, accompanied by peri-ictal schizophreniform-like psychosis (characterized by auditory hallucinations of voices, vivid and elaborate by 1996; delusions; and visual hallucinations), by anosognosia (the inability to recognize that you have medical problems or neurological deficits) and a panoply of other neurological afflictions. Almost 15 years of soul-destroying caregiving (I will rant and rave in fury about American health care in a separate posting) until he died, soon after which I nearly died myself, of necrotizing fasciitis; I never fully recovered, and certainly never got back to Welsh.
Now I read the 1984 paper in amazement at how much I knew about the language. Who was that guy? (Sometimes people want me to give talks like that guy’s famous ones, and I tell them he’s dead, so now they’re stuck with me, someone who’s from a distant corner of the world of scholars and writers from that guy but shares shards of that guy’s personal history.)
(And yes, I’ve been mostly sick the past three days; and no, you really don’t want to hear about it.)
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