[tied] Re: Satem shift

--- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:

> --- 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).

Circular?

[Torsten:]
You should be using better sources. The purists of the 18th could
not have succeeded revising the language in an anti-German direction,
even if they had wanted to, since much of the administration was done
in and a sizable part of the population (Holstein) spoke German. The
Kiøbenhavn > København took place, as I recall it, around 1900, and
it was a post factum thing. Already our national poet, Oehlenschläger
(name says a lot, doesn't it? All our national composers until
Nielsen had names like Kunzen, Kuhlau, Weyse, Heise and Hartmann),
writes that in his childhood (1780's) people still said <sjold> for
<skjold> "shield" and <sjorte> for <skjorte>. The confusion was
complete and no palatal/velar inflection paradigm (as Swedish still
has them) could be recovered from the mess spoken in the cities.

> >
> > 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).

I would imagine (without presuming to know anything about it) that in
that más católico country people would jump at the chance to
pronounce Latin "properly".

> >
> Torsten