Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Syncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long...Show moreSyncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long evaded linguists. This study aims to clarify the rules and restrictions regarding syncope in Lycian. The first chapter will briefly describe the Lycian language, as well as Lycia, the country where it was spoken. The second chapter will define the place of Lycian within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Before undertaking the description of a certain feature in a certain language, it is wise to first narrowly define that feature. This will be done in the third chapter. The fourth chapter will first give an overview of the previous scholarship on syncope in Lycian, after which a detailed analysis will be attempted. This analysis will shed light on the stress patterns of Lycian and show that syncope had worked in a specific period in the past of the language, but that it had since ceased to operate. The fifth and last chapter will summarise the conclusions. This study found that verbs were stressed on the root, or on the suffix, and that nouns were stressed penultimately. Both pre- and post-tonic syllables were syncopated if they were short at the time that syncope took place. In many cases syncope was reversed by paradigmatic levelling.Show less
This thesis tries to resolve the problematic development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian. First it summarizes how the ruki-rule works in other branches of PIE and why one would expect it to...Show moreThis thesis tries to resolve the problematic development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian. First it summarizes how the ruki-rule works in other branches of PIE and why one would expect it to work in Lithuanian as well. Then it gives an overview of the development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian and goes deeper into the opinions of several scholars on how to solve the irregularities. The two main positions are that either the ruki-rule did or it did not work in Lithuanian and examples that prove the opposite are usually explained by both sides as being new formations, borrowings or possibly of different origin. However, the evidence that ruki did take place is much bigger. The last chapter researches a selection of words that show *s after r,u,k,i to possibly find out how these can be explained. Unfortunately, a proper explanation for all the words could not be found, only for some examples new, significant points were obtained. Therefore it could very well be that the variation in s after r,u,k,i is due to older dialects, where the ruki-rule perhaps did not take place, but this cannot be proven. Therefore the author prefers the explanation that the ruki-rule originally did take place in Lithuanian, but that there are cases where it appears it didn't because of flection, borrowings, or association with suffixes in -s.Show less
