Re: [tied] Estimated timeframe from albanian s->sh transformation

29-01-04 17:10, alexandru_mg3 wrote:

> I didn't compare apple with orange. I said ONLY that a global
> shift like s->sh took at least twice the time when a loan spread,
> because the speed of this second process is very very small at the
> beginning:

A GLOBAL shift? What do you mean?

> Why?
> If I hear you saying a word with 'sh' this doesn't mean that I
> will say it too...I prefer to speak it, as I heard to my parents or
> to my friends. If everybody speak around me, with /sh/ , I will make
> the shift too, but this is the final point of this process and not
> the initial one.
> This is in contradiction with a loan situation: if I see
> a 'mouse' in your hands , I will ask you which is its name, and I
> will used that name immediately.
> At least these are some basic arguments ...and I not said like you:
> "So that's how long it can take."

The rate at which innovations spread in a speech community has been
studied by dialectologists and sociolinguists. We don't know how large
the ancestral population of Albanian-speakers was (in demographic or
geographic terms), so any estimate can only be rough, but an innovation
like the one we're discussing is likely to take decades rather than
centuries. The phonetic precursor of the change, i.e. the variable
retraction of /s/ without phonological consequences, may have preceded
the shift proper by a long time, but that's something we'll never know.

Piotr