Re: Orthography supporting sound changes?

Am 7 Jan 2006 12:40:46 GMT schrieb Helmut Richter:

> In article <dpl987$gin$01$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Joachim Pense wrote:
>
>> In principle, It appears not to be impossible to me that reversals of lossy
>> sound changes could happen if the old pronounciation is preserved by
>> writing. I'm thinking of a reversal of a sound merger, or re-appearance of
>> a lost sound.
>>
>> Are there any reported examples of such sound change reversals having
>> happened, where it can be demonstrated (or at least is strongly believed by
>> many) that the orthography was the only preserver of the old situation (so
>> it was not also preserved by maybe regional or social variants of spoken
>> language)?
>>
>> Or are there strong arguments that this is impossible?
>
> Why should it not happen?

I suspected a dogmatic opinion to exist that written language is dependent
on spoken language and the other direction is nonexistent (hence it is
sufficient only to study spoken language).

> Yet I consider it improbable. You need four
> ingredients:
>
> 1) a language that has been written for enough time that sound changes
> could be visible in spelling habits
>
> 2) a conservative and irregular orthography where sound changes do not
> yield spelling changes shortly after
>
> 3) an influence of the spelling on the language
>
> 4) the absence of conservative dialects
>
> For point (2), conservative spelling is not enough. French and German
> spelling are fairly conservative but also fairly regular. There is no
> reason that a silent letter is ressurrected in the pronunciation when
> *all* letters in that position are silent.

I suspect a different phenomenon in German, but I am not at all sure that I
got the facts right:

Assumption 1: "das" and "dass" were one single word in earlier German,
taking the functions of article/pronoun and conjunction.
Assumption 2: later on, the words were separated by spelling.
Now in some German dialects, "das" is pronounced with a long vowel, and
"dass" with a short one.
So I conclude that this sound distinction is caused by the (artificially
introduced) spelling distinction; but I am not sure if either of my two
assumptions really is true.

Joachim
.

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