30-07-03 12:06, tgpedersen wrote:
> Sometimes changes follow laws and sometimes they don't? And therefore
> German 'Haupt' "chief" has the glide of 'Haube' "bonnet"? There are
> new times in linguistics. Now I think I'll let it all hang out!
Was I talking about "laws"? Quite the contrary: I was trying to account
for an _exception_ to regular sound changes, a wrinkle in a regular
pattern. Contamination is a fact of life. Once in a while, a word
becomes phonetically more similar to another word because of a perceived
semantic relationship between them (as in the <male> : <female>
example), which suggests to native speakers (falsely, in this example),
that there ought to be a formal relationship as well. The process is
_sporadic_ and _irregular_, and so invoking it for undocumented
languages a methodologically dangerous thing. But sometimes (as in the
case of <caput> vs. *xaubuda-) we can be fairly sure that something
irregular happened. My guess is contamination (and I'm not alone in
thinking so), but alternative solutions are welcome, if you can offer any.
Piotr