Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/

On Jul 22, 5:19 am, Ruud Harmsen <realemailons...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Phonemes either are or are not.

I objected to that earlier. If that were so, how can [f] and [v] have
been allophones in Old-English and have developed into separate
phonemes in Modern English?

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 17:34:33 -0400: Nathan Sanders
<nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

When the trigger conditions for allophony were eradicated.

Yes, but they weren't eradicated from one day to the next. They
gradually got weakened, over many years or even generations.

Nathan (whose attribution you snipped) is trying to tell you that
phonemic change does not occur instantaneously, but spreads among a
population. At any one moment, any individual idiolect-speaker has
either the pre-change or the post-change system.

If your statement were true, there must have been a fixed date at
which such changes took place.

The date when a child acquires a language that needs them to be
phonemes, if any such date can be determined.

That too is a gradual process. And if in its environment the child
detects an intermediate stage of a gradual process, it'll learn and
copy that intermediate state.

What is an "intermediate state" between having a distinction and not
having it?

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/
    ... phonemes in Modern English? ... The date when a child acquires a language that needs them to be ... phonemes, if any such date can be determined. ... That too is a gradual process. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/
    ... been allophones in Old-English and have developed into separate ... phonemes in Modern English? ... either the pre-change or the post-change system. ...
    (sci.lang)
Loading