Re[4]: [tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?

At 2:17:42 PM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:

> "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 5:23:07 AM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew
>> Jarrette wrote:

>>> Privately I was aware that I was ignoring these
>>> dialectal features. I should have specified that I meant
>>> "standard languages".

>> Why? A standard language is typically in large part the
>> result of historical accidents. Standard English would
>> doubtless be quite different had York been the political
>> and commercial centre of England, and similarly with
>> standard French and, say, Bordeaux. It appears that
>> you're arbitrarily throwing out data that are
>> incompatible with your hypothesis.

> -- But the vast majority of Danish speakers have /v/; only
> a small minority have /w/ instead. In English, on the
> other hand, /w/ is universal and standard. And I am making
> my comments on the language as it is in reality today, not
> what could have been or might have been - I think those
> are irrelevant.

I don't see why, especially in those cases in which we have
not only historical evidence of other possibilities but even
surviving non-standard dialects; in effect you're giving
linguistic significance to accidents of politics, geography,
and the like. You're doing much the same thing when you
(implicitly) claim that the Turkish language changed almost
overnight in 1928, when a Roman alphabet script replaced an
Arabic abjad script.

And in fact if you limit yourself to standard languages,
you're *not* talking about the languages as they are in
reality today: you're excluding millions of native speakers.

> I am only throwing out data that doesn't exist.

Non-standard dialects don't exist?

Brian