Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

Nathan Sanders wrote:
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).

A more convincing example (at least in my dialect) is the difference in the final consonant of <of> and <off>, which were originally the same word -- when used adverbly <off> it was typically phrase-final, thus had the voiceless allophone of the OE fricative, while preposition <of> was frequently followed by a vowel or voiced consonant, which induced the voiced allophone.

ISTM that sound changes may occasionally be blocked (at least temporarily) when they would otherwise lead to loss of an "important" distinction. I'm thinking of things like the loss of Latin final /s/ in Spanish, which appears to have been blocked only when it denoted the plural of nouns (there, it was later extended even to nouns that didn't have it in the first place). Today, even that final /s/ is beginning to be lost in some varieties -- over a millenium after it was dropped elsewhere.

Without having thought too hard about it, isn't this sort of thing pretty close to Analyst's "sound change conditioned by part-of-speech"?

John.

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