Dorsey's Law 1/21/20, 11'40 PM

Dorsey's Law
Nancy E Hall nancyh at linguist.umass.edu
Tue Apr 2 18:55:23 UTC 2002

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Hello,

I am writing a dissertation on epenthetic vowels, and have a few

questions about those that are inserted by 'Dorsey's Law' in Winnebago and
other Siouan languages.

1. Are there any examples of loanwords that have undergone Dorsey's Law?
(I'm looking for evidence that it's synchronically productive).

2. There's a similar-looking process of copy-vowel epenthesis between

sonorants and obstruents in Scots Gaelic:

/tarv/ -> [tarav]

/merg/ -> [mereg]
etc.

(similar conditioning environment to Dorsey's Law, except that the

sonorant and obstruent are in the opposite order)
An interesting thing about the Scots Gaelic process is that native
speakers seem to find the resulting sequence ([tarav]) monosyllabic in
some respects- they have difficulty pausing within it, sing it on one
note, count it as one syllable when asked to count the syllables of a
word, etc.
Does anyone know how native speakers view Dorsey's Law segments?
Have any tests for intuitions about syllabicity been tried?

Nancy

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