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

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 05:12:57 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

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) /

Yes, because it can be read in full elsewhere.

is trying to tell you that
phonemic change does not occur instantaneously, but spreads among a
population.

It does.

At any one moment, any individual idiolect-speaker has
either the pre-change or the post-change system.

No, because which system applied isn't a binary, digital question, but
an analogue matter.

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?

Exactly that. You are beginning to understand the problem and see
reality.
--
Ruud Harmsen
http://rudhar.com

.

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