Romanian
The non-repetitive structure in Romanian place names.
Study of the effect of the phonotactic principle of non-repetition in the Romanian lexicon, measured in the last syllable or CVC sequence of the names of Romanian municipalities, using a statistic procedure.
This strictly synchronic study is aimed, in the first place, at the demonstration that the distribution of derivational suffixes within the names of cities and towns in Romania is guided by a phonotactic rule of non-repetition. Throughout the article we find an under-exploitation of the repetitive sequences compared with the non-repetitive ones. That goes for consonants as for vowels, and for distinctive features, in different manner and to a different degree, according to the situation, i.e. the type of consonant/vowel, or of distinctive feature. It is remarkable that these different phenomena appear in the language at the same time, and very often, even in the same word.
These Romanian phenomena are viewed in the frame of a larger linguistic project studying tendencies towards non-repetition of every kind in all languages. In fact we are talking of pan-chronic tendencies that exercise their influence through history, determining a continuous conditioning of the development of language by the tendency to non-repetition.
This series of linguistic functions, is thus not a barely Romanian one, but present in all languages, as demonstrated in a number of studies by the author, on several languages: Spanish, Italian, Danish, Etruscan, Latin, Greek, English, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Catalan, Provenal, Friulan, etc., all with the same results. This seems to permit us to talk of a LINGUISTIC UNIVERSAL. The author proposes, moreover, for the domain of derivational morphology, an operative description of the effect of this universal linguistic function.
It was found practically in all instances, that there is an under-exploitation of repetitive sequences compared with non-repetitive sequences. This applies to consonants where there is no repetition of the phonemes separately, of the features of articulation point and the features of kind of articulation (while the dimension voiced / unvoiced shows a slight tendency to be repeated). In vowels the effect is less clear and steady, but it is impossible to ignore it. The under-exploitation of the vowel phonemes appear separately, but it is clearer looking at the features of articulation point and of opening degree. It is important that all these phenomena are working in the language at the same time. To be sure, in many cases various types of non-repetition are present simultaneously in the same word.
Our study was conducted on a purely synchronic level; it is evident that the choices that have led to the non-repetitive distribution that we encountered almost everywhere are not all (only) contemporary; on the contrary, it is a pan-chronic trend that exerts its influence throughout history. It would be very interesting to conduct a series of synchronic studies on Romanian place names through time in order to trace the continuous conditioning of language development by the trend of non-repetition.
It is neither a purely Romanian phenomenon, but present in all languages, as in fact is the result of various other studies, carried out on most Romance languages, Germanic languages and various others. Everywhere, the tendency to avoid non-functional repetition is to consider among the UNIVERSALS OF LANGUAGE.