--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> [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).
>
But you forget that in Sw. Köpenhamn the /k/ is pronounced as
the /ch/ of German "ich" (This may be recent, conservative dialects
such as Finnish Swedish even today pronounce <tj>. In Denmark there
was until recently a tradition for pronouncing Swedish used by
aficionados of the Swedish poet Bellman in which /k/ before front
vowel is pronounced <tj> too.) Under those circumstances, going <tj>
to <k> is not the thing you want to do if you want to convince people
you're Danish (and a Scandinavist). It speaks of confusion and
insecurity. At that time (early 19th century) one third of the
population of Copenhagen were German-speakers. Before that time,
patriotism was loyalty to the German-Danish-Norwegian state, in which
a large part of the civil servants were recruited from the then
Danish-ruled Holstein.
Torsten