From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 8640
Date: 2001-08-21
----- Original Message -----From: tgpedersen@...Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 12:01 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Satem shift> [Torsten:] As I've heard it, the tendency in American English today is for the
past participle to be used everywhere eg.: "I have went", "I have took".[Piotr:] "The past participle" ??? And can any American English speakers on this list confirm this strange observation? "I been" or "he gone" do occur in dialectal English, but this is usually the result of auxiliary-verb suppression ("HAVE dropping"), not of paradigmatic levelling.
> [Torsten:] As I described in
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
Danish has experienced a "retrograde" development c^ > k, dy > g, s^ > sk before front vowel (I thought of writing "Did you read it at all?", but that would be rude) under the influence of the German of the ruling classes. But where you would (I suppose) see this as a purely mechanical sweeping process, I see it as the result of uncertainty and wavering of the German-speaking classes (who were suddenly forced to take sides between German and Danish) faced with the irregular paradigms caused by the purely phonetic change /k/ > /c^/, /g/ > /dj/, /sk/ > /s^/. In the ensuing muddle (also linguistically), and with a number of once German-speakers trying to estabilsh themselves as Danish patriots, /s^/ became associated with Germanness, /sk/ with Danishness (and Scandinavism). Therefore, in what seems at first glance to be a purely mechanical change, the first seed were sown by the irregular paradigms, and consequently paradigm regularisation ("morphophonological change") was the real driving force here.[Piotr:] I would not see it as a mechanical sweeping process, since phonetic changes like sk > s^ or k > c^ are unidirectional "by nature", and if the reverse change seems to occurs, it is always results from a dialect shift or analogical change. Anyway, the codification of standard Danish was the work of 18th/19th-century grammarians and anti-German-minded purists, and orthographic considerations evidently played a role in it. Replace the spelling <Kjøbenhavn> with <København>, and sure as eggs is eggs an increasing number of people will soon be settling for a pronunciation consistent with the spelling. (By the way, can you explain cases like this one through paradigmatic regularisation? How do you know that levelling-out was the real driving force, if at the same time you're forced to assume that a great number of words where regularisation is ruled out took a "free ride" or became "infected" with the change? Sounds circular to me).In standard Polish, a pre-war simplification of spelling -- <ge> rather than <gie> in foreign words, where the palatalisation of /g/ was thought to be fully predictable -- soon brought about a general "hardening" of the consonant in educated speech, and now only some elderly people pronounce <generacja> or <geniusz> with /gje/. This is a pure case of orthographically-conditioned sound change (see also the "re-rhoticisation" of New York English, discussed earlier).Your "shibbolethisation" is a real phenomenon in some situations, but you overestimate its role in historical linguistics at large. Well, we all have our pet ideas, but just to broaden your perspective as regards alternative explanations, you might want read a good overview of the discipline. I recommend Hans Heinrich Hock's excellent book "Principles of Historical Linguistics" (1986).
[Torsten:] The morphophonological paradigm levelling of Russian nouns is unidirectional, to my knowledge (Cz. Praha - v Praze, Ru. Praga - v Prage). I don't know of any examples in Russian where the levelling has gone the other way (there are no nom. *noza or *ruca).[Piotr:] This is true, but here the forces were very unequal: the "second palatalisation" affected only the Dat./Loc.sg. (plus rarely used dual forms, long lost in Russian), and the overwhelming majority of case forms, including the most frequently used ones, retained *k, *g. There was no sufficient ground for generalising the palatalised consonant. Consequently, the Slavic languages either retained the alternation (as even Ukrainian and Belarusian did, in addition to Czech, Polish, etc.), or generalised the dominant allomorph with a velar (the case of Russian).Now, since you claim that some IE dialects generalised *K, while others generalised *K^ in originally alternating paradigms, you also have to assume a balance of strength between the two variants. But then full regularisation on either side of the satem/centum divide becomes unlikely.
> [Piotr:] There is another, more devastating counterargument: the Satem shift takes place also in environments where front vowels are absent, e.g. preconsonantally: *k^lewos, *ok^to:, *tek^s-, *g^noh3-, and also in words like *(d)k^mtom (why "satem" rather than "katem"?). The *o-grade *k^omt- is attested, but **k^emt- is not. Without addressing such issues and analysing concrete linguistic material your scenario is an exercise in armchair linguistics.
>[Torsten:] As I understand you you are saying that
c^eC-
koC-
kC-
may be regularised
c^eC-
c^oC-
kC-
but never
c^eC-
c^oC-
c^C-
That does not make any sense. I must have misunderstood you somewhere?[Piotr:] Yes, you did. I'm speaking exclusively of forms that have *K^ in a non-alternating environment. For example, the IE root *k^leu- has the allomorphs *k^lou- and *k^lu-, but not **k^elu- or the like. There is no form which could serve as the basis for "satem regularisation" here. You could say (as you did, in fact) that such words were "infected" with a change initiated elsewhere, but this loose idea of "infection" is arbitrary, since other similar roots were not infected (e.g. *kreuh2- 'blood') and you don't provide an explanation for that.