- All languages are much more similar than they could've been
- All languages are much more similar than they could've been, says Peter Jurgec, who defended his ph.d.-thesis in linguistics on January 13th. Jurgec's aim was to develop a new theoretical model for the linguistic phenomenon of assimilation.
Assimilation, when speaking of the linguistic term, describes the process where a sound becomes more or less similar to another sound. This can happen when one sound affects the other so that it changes. An example can be of good help here: When saying "don't be too complicated", the n and the t are assimilated by the b that follows. And you say something like "dompe too complicated".
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A well-studied phenomenon
In linguistics, assimilation is a well-studied phenomenon. There are a lot of theories of assimilation out there. Why then do we need a new theory? We should let Peter Jurgec, ph.d., answer this:
- There are a lot of theories of assimilation out there. And that is a part of the problem. Any of these theories are quite adept at explaining a particular type of assimilation, but they cannot account for the other cases. My thesis is an attempt at a theory that is general enough to do all known cases of assimilation, but at the same time doesn't predict unattested types. Furthermore, my theory allows a unification with some other phonological patterns, such as dissimilation (in which one sound becomes less similar to another) and morphological effects (where, for example, assimilation is limited to a particular position within a word).
Assimilation does not occur only in English. Most, if not all languages exhibit assimilation, and many have several types of assimilation. This creates an enormous variation and a complex set of empirical data:
- Here lies the challenge: How to provide a single analysis of all these patterns, in all languages. This is particularly important since not all possible combinations of assimilation are found. For example, we know of no language - call it Anti-English - which would have the same plural ending as the actual English, but the choice between s/z would depend on the word-initial sound. This reveals that all languages are much more similar than they could've been, Jurgec states. And he continues by explaining his own project:
- In my thesis, a great deal of attention is put into reviewing the known assimilation patterns. The task was two-fold. First, to build up a theory that can deal with all known cases of assimilation. Second, such a theory must be restrictive enough to exclude those possible cases of assimilation that have not been found and are deemed impossible given the languages we do know, says Peter Jurgec - on email from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he is currently a visiting professor.
Not originally from neither Norway, nor USA, Peter Jurgec was born in Ljubljana in Slovenia in 1979. He came to Tromsø and UiT in 2007 to a part of CASTL.
