Marc Picard

On the evaluation of competing analyses in historical phonology: Naturalness, minimality and the case of Armenian /erk/

Abstract The degree of accuracy and reliability achieved in reconstructing any part of the phonological history of a language will depend largely on the extent to which certain principles of phonological change are respected. It will be argued here that the two most important constraints on any proposed sound change are naturalness and minimality. Since the plausibility of any historical reconstruction stems mainly from the ability to consistently distinguish sound changes from (diachronic) sound correspondences on the basis of these two factors, examples from Western Romance will be given to show how these principles can be applied to the best advantage, and a new solution will be proposed to the problem of deriving /erk/ from ∗dw in Armenian.

/s/-deletion in Old French and the aftermath of compensatory lengthening

It has recently been argued by Gess (2001) that the long vowels resulting from the compensatory lengthening that emerged in the wake of preconsonantal /s/-deletion in Old French had all been shortened by the sixteenth century. Given that many of these long vowels are still present in Canadian French, this conclusion cannot possibly be correct. What will be shown here is precisely how Gess methodology led him to obtain such counterfactual results.

On the Translation of French-Canadian Family Names in English

Abstract Many French-Canadian family names were altered when their bearers emigrated to various English-speaking areas of North America. As in the case of all the other foreign names that were anglicized for various social and linguistic reasons, different types of adaptive mechanisms were at work. The most common were purely orthographical in nature, ranging from the simple elimination of diacritics to the replacement of unfamiliar vowel and consonant sounds. Other surname modifications went beyond spelling changes and were dependent upon some notion of structural or semantic equivalence. Some were based solely on the fact that a French name sounded vaguely similar to an existing English surname while other non-orthographical substitutions involved translation. The object of this study will be to examine how this process affected French-Canadian surnames wherein this adaptive mechanism was particularly prevalent and diverse.

Channel Islands Surnames of French Origin in North America

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, migrants from the Channel Islands settled in various parts of North America. Many of them bore French names which their ancestors had brought over from Normandy and Brittany to Jersey and Guernsey in previous centuries. However, since many of these surnames were no longer found to exist in France or had evolved beyond recognition, their etymologies became irretrievable in standard French onomastic works. In this study, it will be shown that their origins can be ascertained for the most part by supplementing traditional research methods with the vast onomastic, geographical and genealogical data that has become available on the internet in recent years.

On the Origin of Hagionyms in North American French Surnames

Abstract Most surnames of French origin in North America were borne by migrants from various parts of France, so it is hardly surprising that the two sets should share many commonalities. One of these involves the existence of hagionymic family names, for example, Saint-Pierre, Saint-Jean, Sainte-Marie, and the like. A significant difference between them, however, is that the ones in present-day France invariably stem from surnames that were taken directly from hagiotoponyms, of which there were a great many, whereas the majority of those in North America originate from nicknames — the so-called dit names — of various types. Prominent among these were the numerous noms de guerre that discharged soldiers passed on to their descendants.

Issues in the glottalic theory of Indo-European: The comparative method, typology and naturalness

AbstractThe Glottalic Theory of Proto-Indo-European, whereby the traditional voiced series of stops *b, *d, *g has been replaced by the ejectives *p’, *t’, *k’, has been argued for mainly on typological grounds. What I will try to show here is that since any proposed sound change must satisfy the condition of naturalness, every reconstructed segment or class of segments, no matter how typologically plausible, must be derivable in each daughter language in conformity with this fundamental principle. To illustrate this, I will present a case from Proto-Algonkian showing how both the comparative method and typological considerations are insufficient to help us choose whether should be reconstructed since these two factors are not necessarily determinative of naturalness.