Talk:Ablaut

message: Ish_ishwar asked me to weigh in on this issue. Being mostly acquainted with African languages and linguistics, I can confirm that the term ablaut, regardless of its historic (IE) origins, is used today in a wider sense — for instance, I frequently come across it in the context of Afro-Asiatic languages. But rather than bringing only my anecdotic evidence, I've decided to sample a few databases of linguistic publications to see how ablaut and apophony are used in academic linguistics. 
Searching for 'ablaut' in title in the CSA Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts database returns 41 hits, of which 9 are non-IE. A similar search in the bibliographical database of linguistics returns 48 hits, of  which about 10 concern non-IE languages. The overall numbers are quite low, of course, because I only searched within titles. Regardless, I think we can draw two conclusions: (1) 'ablaut' is used widely in IE linguistics, (2) it is also a common term in the linguistic tradition of some other phyla. It is important to note that the body of IE linguistics as a whole is many times larger than that of many other phylogenetic subfields, so that when we find seven out of forty hits relating to Native American languages this means that use of ablaut in NA linguistics is quite common actually.
Apophony is, according to my searches, only marginally used compared to ablaut. Perhaps surprisingly, its use seems to be mainly confined to IE linguistics. CSA/LLBA yields only nine results, of which eight pertain to IE languages (and one to Afro-Asiatic Bilin). BL Online yields three results, of which two are about IE languages. Conclusion: if we take a usage-based perspective, apophony is definitely not the general term; ablaut is. And the latter one is used commonly in non-IE contexts.
For Wikipedia practice this means, I think, that we should have a general article at Ablaut, one that is not confined to IE languages. Of course that article should mention the original scope of the term. And apophony is probably better of as a redirect to Ablaut. — mark ✎ 17:47, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quick-and-dirty quantification 

message: Just a question:  For those of you who want to use the word Ablaut to mean all grammatically significant vowel alterations, would you include Umlaut as a subcategory of Ablaut?  That would seem to me to be the logical consequence of this broadening.  After all, the vowel gradations in Indo-European and in Semitic are so very different that a term which means both is inevitably a catch-all, and it would be difficult then to exclude other phenomena if they are even vaguely analogous.  But for Indo-European linguistics, especially for Germanic, that would be disasterous.  It would result in a confusion of two things which people too often confuse anyway, and which we have to work SO hard to disambiguate in the minds of our students.  --Doric Loon 14:18, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: it would depend on what you mean by Umlaut. If you mean vowel assimilation, then this is not a subtype of ablaut. If you mean a grammatical vowel alternation that developed historically because of a previous vowel assimilation process which is no longer active because the trigger of the assimilation disappeared, then this is a subtype of ablaut. These different meanings are not made clear in many writings. Yes, too bad for the students!  I think that we would want a "catch-all" that caught all of the vowel alternations in every language. Semitic langs are different, and they are analyzed in different ways (not everyone considers Semitic patterns to be "alternations"; one other considers them "transfixes", i.e. discontinuous affixes). peace – ishwar  (speak) 06:58, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: What about Umlaut?