Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

In article <wgi9k.15469$IK1.3897@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

Right, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's possible for
homophones, by the nature of their meanings or lexical categories, to
appear predominately in different phonetic environments, and
eventually cease being homophonous via leveling of the altered
pronunciation of one of them across all environments (one factor in
language change is allomorphy avoidance, which can sometimes cause one
of many allomorphs to be lexicalized, wiping out many/all of the other
allomorphs).

But it is still the phonetic environment that triggers (or blocks) the
relevant sound change. "Of" didn't undergo voicing because it was a
preposition---it underwent voicing because it was in a phonetic
environment conducive to voicing, and instances of "of" not in that
environment were changed to match the most commonly used form (again,
not because they are prepositions, but because of another functional
factor).

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"?

Whatever blocked s-deletion was most likely a phonetic environment
that the relevant words typically occurred in. I don't know the
relevant facts here however, so this is just a guess, but I'd expect
the non-deleting /s/s to have typically occurred pre-vocalically
(causing them to be resyllabified as onsets, and thus, blocking
deletion).

Nathan

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

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