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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
In a recent article I attempted to establish a more concise definition both of palatalized consonants and of palatal consonants. The process of defining the latter involved the elucidation of the distinction between lamino-palatal and centro-palatal consonants.
There is still some confusion about the meanings and uses of the derivatives of the term palatal. The term is derived from palate, and it refers in compound forms to a consonant, the point of articulation of which is on the hard palate. From the form palatal the verb palatalize is derived; this causes some confusion, since it refers to two different events, i.e., it has two formal meanings in the same way that nationalize has at least two formal meanings. In one sense the latter means “to make national in character” and in a second sense “to make into a nation,” among other meanings. Although Webster’s only recognizes one definition of palatalize it is possible to establish a twofold definition for it analogous to nationalize.
1 De Armond, R. C., “‘Palatal’ and ‘Palatalized’ Redefined,” CJL 11 (1966), pp. 109–113.Google Scholar
2 For use of the term palatal in non-compound forms, see ibid., pp. 112-13.
3 Halliday, M. A. K., “Categories of the Theory of Grammar,” Word 17 (1963), pp. 244–45.Google Scholar
4 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (College Edition: New York and Cleveland, 1955), p. 997.
5 Ibid., p. 1051.
6 The original articulator and the point of articulation may vary slightly when a consonant is co-articulated. For example, [t] in Russian is an apicodental stop, whereas [t′] is a palatalized lamino-alveolar stop: L. G. Skalozub, Palatogrammy i rentgenogrammy soglasnyx fonem russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (Kiev, 1963), pp. 57-58. The changes are slight and have no phonological role, in contrast to the development of [c′] from [t] and [k].
7 In the view of generative phonology, the biunique phoneme is considered superfluous, and the processes are generally discussed in terms of acoustic features. See Halle, Morris, “Phonology in a Generative Grammar,” Word 18 (1962), pp. 54–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his The Sound Pattern of Russian (The Hague, 1959), pp. 22-23. The purpose of this paper is neither to become involved in the controversy of biunique phonemes, nor to refute acoustic features, but to clarify certain terms of articulatory phonetics, since the study of articulatory phonetics remains significant in linguistics.
8 The rules of morphophonemic alternation are based primarily on Jakobson’s rules, Jakobson, Roman, “Russian Conjugation,” Word 4 (1948), pp. 155–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another interpretation, see Morris Halle, “O pravilax russkogo sprjažnenie,” American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavists (The Hague, 1963), pp. 113-32.
9 Cf.Fairbanks, Gordon H., Historical Phonology of Russian (Poona, 1965), pp. 32–33 Google Scholar. The above process he terms “front-vowel palatalization”: his symbol [tj] is equivalent to my [t′].
10 Ibid., p. 64.
11 Ibid., p. 35.
12 For various uses of terminology concerning these processes and other types of palatalization, see George Y. Shevelov, A Prehistory of Slavic (New York, 1965), chs. 14, 17, 21, 23, 31, and 34.
13 Since palatalized is a participle, it denotes the result of a process. The English word soft and the Russian work mjagkij are both used to denote palatalized consonants, but they do not refer to a past process or a morphophonemic process. A curious question could be formulated: What term would linguists use in lieu of palatalized if a palatalized consonant were not in morphophonemic alternation with an unpalatalized consonant, and the former could be shown not to be derived diachronically from the latter?