Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

In article <bogus-11F281.19340827062008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jack Campin - bogus address <bogus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Is there evidence of sound change be conditioned by part-of-speech?
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but the answer is probably no. If
two words are homophonous, they will undergo the same sound changes
with the same results, regardless of their parts of speech.
(Keep in mind that I'm talking about systematic change here. Sporadic
change is always possible, and it's one of the few ways homophones can
diverge.)

Can't word order affect that? If some particular part of speech
is always sentence-final, won't it be subject to different sound
changes than a homophone which is aways initial or medial? (I'm
not pretending to have an example).

Note that occurring phrase-finally or phrase-medially is still
technically a phonetic environment, since you have the
absence/presence of some sound following the word.

But yes, this sort of thing could be a way of distinguishing two
homophones (an analogous example is "to" versus "two"; the former is
nearly always unstressed, leading to reduction of the vowel, while the
latter is nearly always stressed, preserving the vowel quality).

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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