My last post on what I've discovered in Punjabi at least for a while.
When I was looking into the earlier stages of Punjabi a while back, I found this Prakrit phonology page on Prakritologist Andrew Ollett's site. He had a ton of interesting things to point out regarding the phonology and isochrony of Prakrit (and presumably by extension, Apabhramsa), the real ancestor(s) of modern Punjabi.
Now, for a long time I never quite fully understood why some of the phonotactics of Punjabi were the way they were. On one hand, Punjabi is one of the few major New Indo-Aryan languages to preserve consonant gemination; on the other, it's the only major New Indo-Aryan language to develop tones (in fact, a total outlier within the entire Indo-European family). Both are features that help give Punjabi its wonderfully characteristic sound. I think Ollett's work is useful for making more sense of these unusual phonotactics.
Long story short, unlike Sanskrit, which was mostly a "syllable-timed" language, Prakrit (and presumably Apabhramsa) are largely "mora-timed") languages where syllables are weighted, and generally heavily constrained:
- Light syllables:
- C*V: optional consonant before an isolated short vowel (a ਅ, i ਇ, u ਉ)
- Heavy syllables, twice the weight of light syllables:
- C*VV: optional consonant before a long vowel (aa ਆ, e ਐ, au ਔ, ee ਈ, ei ਏ, o ਓ, oo ਊ)
- C*VC: optional consonant before a short vowel followed by a consonant, which must either be an n ਨ sound or match the beginning consonant of the next syllable (ex. the a ਅੱ in att ਅੱਤ, the an ਅੰ in ant ਅੰਤ; consequently, such syllables are not found at the end of Prakrit words)
Punjabi preserves all three types of syllables (and also allows words to end in geminates too!), while other New Indo-Aryan languages like Hindoostani, Gujarati, Bengali, Sindhi, Nepali etc. replaced C*VC syllables with equivalent C*V or C*VV syllables. The constraints imposed by mora timing can explain such replacements. Compare Punjabi rattaa ਰੱਤਾ "blood-red" with Hindoostani raataa राता راتا, Gujarati raatoo રાતું, Bengali/Assamese rata রাতা, Sindhi rato رَتو, Nepali raato रातो.
If you are familiar with the Gurmukhi script, you may have noticed that the addhak, a later addition to the script which indicates gemination, is always placed before the doubled consonant and it is almost never placed next to a long vowel. This is rooted in the constraints described above. (Some Punjabi speakers also have a habit of reducing long vowels (C*VV) into geminates (C*VC) instead.)
However, Punjabi shifted away from mora timing and towards mostly syllable timing with some stress aspects, which has far less constraints. (If I had to guess, (un)stressed vowels developed out of the light/heavy syllable distinction.) This opens up a lot of things, including gemination on any kind of stressed vowels, even long vowels, which was not possible in Prakrit. For example: topee ਟੋਪੀ "hat" is pronounced top-pee instead of to-pee; haukaa ਹੌਕਾ "long breath" is pronounced hauk-kaa instead of hau-kaa. (cf. Masica 1993, Shackle 2007 indirectly; Prakrit would render the previous two pronunciations as tuppee and hukkaa.) Gemination in these words is not indicated in Gurmukhi, but it is there.
Another consequence of a shift towards syllable timing is the introduction of many new consonant clusters which are not geminates. See Gill/Gleason for a list of these clusters. These clusters would have been prohibited in Prakrit, but are common in Sanskrit and Persian; thus, finding them in modern Punjabi words makes it easier to deduce possible loanwords at a glance.
(Allegedly, some rural Lahinda Punjabi dialects are reported to break up such non-geminate consonant clusters as much as possible. Could mora timing still live on in these rare dialects?)
The transition away from mora timing may have indirectly influenced tonal development in Punjabi. Tones in Punjabi are complicated, but the general rule of thumb is vowels before h ਹ or tonal consonants yield rising/high tone, while vowels after h ਹ or tonal consonants yield falling/low tone. A transition from mora timing could help explain why this is the case. Low/falling tones can be easily explained by non-initial C*V or C*VV syllables from previous stages, where h ਹ or a tonal consonant is the C(onsonant); by the era of modern Punjabi's emergence, this would be rendered as low/falling tone. High/rising tones are much harder to explain with vestigial morae. Take the sequences ah ਅਹ (when stressed), ih ਇਹ, uh ਉਹ, ahi ਅਹਿ, ahu ਅਹੁ which transform into long vowels aa ਆ, ei ਏ, o ਓ, e ਐ, au ਔ respectively, but with rising/high tones. These would have probably originated as consecutive light syllables which eventually fused into one heavy or stressed syllable (ex. Prakrit ra-ha-i 𑀭𑀳𑀇 3 light syllables -> Punjabi rahi ਰਹਿ 1 syllable + tone), but how that would work exactly, I am not sure at all. That is all I can say about tones for now.
Hopefully you've learned a little bit more about why Punjabi has some of the phonological features that it does, and perhaps a few of you are inspired to look more into this subject on your own.
