Re: Orthography supporting sound changes?

Seán O'Leathlóbhair wrote:
>
> Where is the linguist's "cannot happen"?

In 1957, Martin Joos published the statement, "Languages differ from
each other without limit and in unpredictable ways."

This statement was widely admired by the American Descriptivists whose
work he was summing up in his commentaries in *Readings in Linguistics*.

Note the irony of the date.

That was the year when Chomsky first published his adumbrations of the
concept of "universal grammar," initially instantiated as the Language
Acquisition Device, which represented the evolved, hereditary immutable
core of all human language -- meaning that languages do _not_ differ
without limit, and the ways they differ are (theoretically) predictable.

So linguistics's "cannot"s tend to be of the form,

"No language uses concord to mark every other word in a sentence."

"In no language is there an inflectional or derivational process
consisting of reversing the order of segments in a morpheme."

"In no utterance do words necessarily occur in alphabetical order (scil.
phonetic order, say from front to back of the mouth)."

Or, on the basis of properties of "UG," or of human intelligence in
general,

"No language can have utterances with seven layers of center-embedding."

"No language can violate the Ross Constraints." (Or other empirical
observations; if such a violation is found in some language, they
rewrite the posited constraints: that's the "science" part of Chomskyan
linguistics -- it makes testable predictions. This is not to be confused
with the Algross sort of "science" of languages, at least as it's been
rationaly presented by Vic Yngve, whose approach seems to be a return to
Bloomfield 1914's notion of language as behavior; all we can observe is
the stimuluses and responses, we can say nothing about language itself.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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