Lexember Day 04 - cotton

For blogular purposes, I think it’s worth talking about some of the disparate sound changes that have led to this word, beyond just the few I’ve mentioned in the etymology.

I’ll start with the easy one (already hinted at): Why the orthography change from 〈ju〉 to 〈eu〉? In early modern Valthungian, there’s a new rule that kicks in causing /ju/ to lower after liquids; more specifically, /rju/ → [rɛʊ̯] and /lju/ → [ljɛʊ]. (Why does /l/ get to keep its palatal glide? That’s a story for another day!) In most cases, this change isn’t reflected in writing, but /ɛʊ̯/ does already exist phonemically from other processes (usually related to umlaut), so when collapsing the unwieldy /trjuˈwujla/ into something less tangy, it became common to change the spelling accordingly, and by the and of the first half of the 20th century, it was standard.

The spicier change, though, happened 1200 years earlier in the period leading up to Old Valthungian. Remember on Lexember Day 1, when I mentioned some “L-changes” that I hadn’t publicly codified yet? This is one of them. Sometime around 700ᴀᴅ, a Series of Unfortunate Events occur, first to the geminate consonants, and subsequently to the liquids. First, /Vll/ and /Vrr/ undergo an implausible sort of metathesis, becoming /lVl/ and /rVr/, respectively. Some weird things later happen to R, but we’ll catch up with them another time. Meanwhile, this is the first stage of a rule I’m calling “L-shattering,” a 300-ish year process during which something slightly different happens to almost every conceivable phonological combination involving /l/. So first, /wulla/ → /wlula/, as described above. Next, /lul/ becomes /uil/, leading to /wuila/ (Old Valthungian vvila). Not much actually happens after that to this combination in particular, but a number of different things happen to other L-having segments.

It is probably also worth mentioning, if you’ve bothered to read this far – first of all, thank you! – and also the final back-and-forth of the ending of trio… So, a good 2000 years ago, during the formation of East Germanic, the neuter ending /wã/ lost its vowel to a final unstressed vowel deletion rule, leaving /triw/. By Old Valthungian, this /iw/ had come to be /ju/, despite spelling it 〈iv〉. In Middle Valthungian, final unstressed /u/ became /o/, but I obviously have a typo in the image, so please ignore that because I’m not regenerating it now for the sake of a single O. And finally, an early Modern Valthungian rule vocalizes glides before final vowels, resulting in /trjo → tri.o/, shortly before the aforementioned shift of /rju/ to /rɛʊ̯/, so the standalone form does not have this change (trio /ˈtri.o/, but dative trjuga /ˈtrɛʊ̯.ɡa/).

There’s some other stuff to be said about compounds, but that’s enough for today. Happy Lexembering!