Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

In article
<5eed9bf3-127f-4817-89fa-5653f33c81bd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jul 25, 1:27 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 25, 10:56 am, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jul 25, 9:37 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What is this "hard sound / soft sound" crap?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

To answer that I need to know if you think "reductive sound change" is
meaningful.

What's it supposed to mean, that it "reduces" the number of letters
you spell it with? Of course it isn't "meaningful."

we are talking about sounds, not letters.

here are some examples of palatalization I picked up from the web:

There is an unfortunate ambiguity in the term "palatalization" in
linguistics.

Phoneticians use it to mean a secondary, high-front articulation,
symbolized in IPA with a superscript j.

Historical linguistics and phonologists use it to mean both phonetic
palatalization as above as well as the further changes that typically
arise from it (most often affrication of stops, because full palatal
closures are difficult to make without an accompanying fricated
release).

Since I work a lot with the intersection of phonetics and historical
linguistics, I prefer to keep the concepts distinct, with
"palatalization" for the former and "palatal mutation" for the latter.

To me these are reductive (of atriculatory effort) or softening
(replacing hard sounds by soft sounds) sound changes and would tend to
occur naturally in spoken language and the reverse changes would be
unnatural and rare.

A conditioned sound change of the form A > B / C_D is natural for a
reason: because ACD is less natural than CBD. Why should CBD > CAD
also be natural? Ice melts when it's in high temperatures. Why would
you expect water to also freeze in high temperatures?

Water *can* freeze, of course, but the conditioning environment has to
be different. The same with sound changes. A > B might be natural in
one kind of environment C_D, while B > A could be natural in a
different environment E_F.

Because of this, when you just look at the A > B portion separate from
the environment, it very well could either be "reductive" (lenition,
deletion, coalescence, monophthongization, shortening) or "fortive"
(fortition, epenthesis, splitting, diphthongization, lengthening).
(And of course, some sound changes are neither one of these:
assimilation and dissimilation, for example.)

And has been pointed out to you, if "reductive" sound changes were at
all significantly more frequent than other types (frequent enough to
be noticeable, at least), we would all be speaking like French by now.

But obviously, we aren't. There is some factor (or factors) in sound
change that resists "reduction". That factor doesn't lie dormant,
waiting for the language to reach a French-like state before it kicks
in... this factor is *constantly* present, creating a perpetual
tug-of-war between different directly opposing forces, with languages
getting pushed around in a space of possible states, with no stable
resting point.

There's a whole wealth of work on this sort of thing. Read up on
Lindblom, Maddieson, Martinet, and more recently, Boersma and Flemming.

Nathan

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

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