Non-repetition in Indo-European languages

Pott

August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887)

August Friedrich Pott, in his Etymologische Forschungen vol. II, 1836, pp. 65-112, presents a chapter of 48 pages on dissimilation. According to Pott the term "Dissimilation" is used here, in a Grammar, maybe for the first time. It corresponds to what in Rhetoric is called Variation, variety, which means, e.g., that you will avoid an expression as fortunatam natam, escaping repetition. The text has hundreds of examples from several languages, mostly Indo-European, in particular the classical ones, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, but also from modern languages, English, French, German, Hungarian, Mongolian. Much of it is concerned with reduplication and the problems arising from the two opposed tendencies: the use of doubling, reduplication, i.e. repetition, to express a grammatical feature, such as plurality in the nouns, or perfective or aoristic aspect in the verbs, and, in contrast to that, the tendency to avoid repetition. The first one is specific, tied to the few features where it exercises its grammatical functions, the second is completely generic, works everywhere and, as such, is weaker, while the specific one, of course, is stronger. Otherwise you would not have reduplication. Pott does not make these generalizing considerations. He starts giving some examples of repetitions that people often try to avoid, like "en en jugeant", "die die Menschen lieben", "mit desto sichererer Nachricht", concluding that "the languages that we treat flee repetition of the same sound". P. 66 he says that "you cannot call it anything else than dissimilation, when the Sanskrit language neutralizes the hiatus, i.e. vowel + vowel, changing the first vowel in the corresponding consonant, e.g. j, w, r." This is also found in other languages, for instance "Basque, eurija instead of euria.

Further (p. 66-7): "The sequence of two syllables with identical or similar onset is unpleasant. The phonetic organs must do the same movements twice, which is fatiguing, and also boring for the ear... Two (consecutive) aspirated sounds are disagreeable, mostly when they belong to the same organ, e.g. φ - φ... In Kennedy's Mahrat dictionary I find the following reduplications: dawadawan .. thabathaban ... Repetition is often used to express plurality or superlativeness, It. tosto tosto, Lat. quis-quis... In many languages are in favour phrases where a verb is accompanied by another word of the same root, for emphasis: miseram vivam vivere. However, this deeply impactful striving towards quantitative expression of a higher degree, in several languages, came gradually into an uncomfortable contrast with the natural desire of beauty (p. 67). That is why reduplication in part has been eliminated from Latin, German .. and even in Sanskrit. Also where reduplication is preserved, it has often needed to adapt to the laws of euphony, dissimilation (p.68).

P. 96-98 Pott discusses the -alis / -aris question in Latin. He is fully aware that the basic form is -alis, which is used everywhere except after an -l- in the word: annalis, muralis, ocularis; exceptions: when the word has -l- + -r-: lateralis, or when the -l- is covered by another consonant: fluvialis, and a few others, not explained (Pott, apparently, does not consider the possibility that different cases may be explained as created after that the rule ceased to work). Pott has seen that the rule of phonotactic distribution -l- + -alis > -l- + -aris is general, and when this does not verify, there is a clear sub-rule blocking the rule: -l-+-r- + -aris > -l-+-r- + -alis.

At the end of the chapter, at p. 108 et seq., Pott resumes the description of the phenomena in these terms: "In the preceding pages we have tried to document the Dissimilation in its many ramifications, transforming and disfiguring words through change of homorganic sounds into heterorganic ones...; in certain instances it can be regular and with numerous occurrences, like reduplication, in other cases it is singular and is found mainly in loanwords... Finally we will give evidence for how also often in inflection and composition repetition of the same sound is blocked or circumvented... (examples:) m. nutritor but f. nutrix, stipendio (stip- + pend), French matin from Latin matutinum, sœur from soror... In German the diminutive suffix has l not k, when the basis contains a velar at the end: bockelen" (here Pott refers to Grimm vol. III).

Pott, in 1836, had about this understanding of dissimilation (non-repetition):
   1) Dissimilation is the process of making similar elements less similar or avoiding that they become similar.
   2) It is found in inflective morphology, word derivation, in composition as syllabic haplology, in single-word cases (p. 108). Also avoiding of hiatus (p. 66), "adjustment" of reduplication (p. 67-).
   3) Sometimes it comprises a large number of words and has a systematic character (p. 108).
   4) In other cases it concerns only one word or a small group of words, and it can be hard to establish any kind of specific rule for the phenomenon (p. 108).
Pott does not separate any of the different situations, language change in the traditional sense (pèlerin), distribution of affixes (-chen/-lein, reduplication), syllabic haplology (matin), but considers it all dissimilation (i.e. non-repetition). Also in this case, he was a real pioneer.

The full title of this volume of Pott's is: Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Indo-Germanischen Sprachen, insbesondere des Sanskrit, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Littauischen, und Gothischen, Zweiter Theil. Grammatischer Lautwechsel und Wortbildung. Lemgo, 1836.