Re: The monumental stupidity of PIE theorists further illustrated

On Jul 26, 12:38 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 26, 9:26 am, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:





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 ?

I mentioned Labov only because you mentioned Labov.

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.

You do not know the truth about yourself. Your language is only under
your conscious control when you are planning in advance what you
intend to say, and such occasions are very rare.


Wrong again:

Imagine the following occasions:

(1) buying groceries
(2) talking to a small child
(3) helping a poor-speaker of English with directions
(4) talking to inner city kids
(5) giving some information over the phone (name, CC number etc.)
(6) a classroom lecture
(7) acting in a broadway play
(8) Making a wedding vow (taken from Dylan)


Is the speaker's inner awareness of his language and his language
itself going to be the same in all cases (of course once he is "in
stride" in each situation he might speak appropriately without being
aware of it)?

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.

And if you ever became a competent Hindi speaker, you would not be
"constantly guessing," the right concord would simply emerge from your
mouth with no conscious attention whatsoever.


Since that is unlikely, I could either mangle Hindi genders blithely
or be tentative and self-conscious while speaking Hindi and take
constant cues from the listener.

Any more than you have to "constantly guess" about the gender of a
Tamil noun.

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.

Wrong yet again. It is absolutely normal for a person to adapt their
speech in the direction of the speech community they are among; it is
absolutely normal for someone who has worked to divest themself of a
regional accent to use it when they return home; in particular, when
Hillary goes to Chicago, she sounds more like the native Chicagoan she
is (she is from a middle-class northwest suburb). (Edwards and Gore,
of course, _are_ natives of "the South," which is not a single dialect
region.) All this is entirely unconscious.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

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