Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

On Jul 25, 11:35 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 25, 7:14 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jul 25, 6:30 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 25, 3:10 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The hoi polloi are constantly trying to vandalize language ("buh-bye")
while the linguistic elite either preserve or even fortify (John
Mclaughlin's lyrical, resonating "bye-bye").

You have this bizarre, elitist, perhaps caste-driven (are you a
Brahmin?) notion that language change is a deliberate, consciously
driven process that is imposed on language by low classes and resisted
by high classes, which is tterly ridiculous, and until you understand
that, there is no point at all in your attempting to comment on it at
all.

Bad choice of words -

On whose part?

the language preservers take good care of how
they speak (enforced by subtle, unconscious peer pressure perhaps) -
rather like personal grooming - and perhaps it becomes routine for
them to always speak well.

Bull***. NO ONE consciouusly "takes good care of how they speak" at
all, or even at most, times. Labov, whom you so ignorantly invoke
below, showed in his very first publications -- his dissertation --
that conscious control of diction is shockingly easy to overcome, even
in the most self-conscious (scil. lower middle class female) speakers.


Why do you relentlessly quote authority even for an everyday
observation you can make for yourself ?

You are of course colossally wrong because I am conscious of all three
languages I speak and in the case of English - I speak two varieties -
one to Westerners and another to South Asians.

On the rare occasions when I speak Hindi - I have to constantly guess
the gender of nouns (since Tamil has a neuter gender and Hindi does
not) and am continually looking from cues from the person I am
talking to.

I also wonder if (American) Southerners who have moved to the North go
through some conscious processes to decide how Southern they want to
sound in a given situation. They say that Hillary Clinton, John
Edwards and Al Gore would try to sound "native" when they spoke in the
South. This is very unlikely to be an unconscious process.
.

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