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TWO NOTES ON INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION
BY
M. A. MEAENDALE, Poona.
(1) Reconsideration of Hoenigswald's Rulc of Internal Reconstruction.
HOENIGSWALD in his paper on Sound Change and Linguistic Structure observes: "compulsory alternation between restricted / x/ and free /y/ in a paradigm indicates a previous conditional sound change from / x / to /y/ in the position from which it is now excluded." To illustrate his point, Hoenigswald gives an instance from modern Gerinan where voiced stops do not occur in syllable-final position. This gives an alternation/d/~/t/in a paradigm / Bunde/ but / Bunt 1. Since in this position /d/ is restricted in comparison to ltl, the above rule permits us to reconstruct syllable final /t/ as id/ and imagine a conditioned sound change of d to t in that position in the history of modern German.
HOENIGSWALD's rule works very well in cases where for a given alternation the pertinent environnents are only two as in the above case. The rule also works satisfactorily in some cases where thc cnvironments concerned are more than two. This can be illustrated with the paradigm of Sanskrit sarad: surad-and farad. bhyon, surat and saral-s. The restriction and freedom of occurrence of the alternating phonemes in the Sanskrit language can be shown in the following way :
Before a vowel
2 Before a voiced stop
3 Word final
Before an unvoiced fricative
X
V
Since in the environments which are pertinent for this alternation d is more restricted, we reconstruct it as the phoneme of the proto-stage and explain the alternation as a result of the phonetic change d>t in the environments concerned.
1. Readings in linguistics, p. 140.
Madhu Vidyā/357
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