----- Original Message -----
From: "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...>
To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Cardinal and Ordinal Integers



> If a counterexample can be found to a general statement, the general
statement is falsified

The regularity principle is not a general statement. It is a working heuristic, like the assumption that (in my country at least) cars normally drive on the right-hand side of the road. Everybody knows sound change is not really exceptionless (some changes are; think, fore example, of the lost of preconsonantal /r/ in British Enflish). But you can't do historical linguistics at all without assuming that it is _normally_ regular in the historical perspective (which is borne out by observation) and that exceptions should be accounted for. The principle works very well in practice.

> William Wang has already clearly falsified the Neogrammarian Rule that sound change is regular.

Wang has studied the lexical diffusion of sound changes. Like everyone else, he implicitly uses the regularity oprinciple to define sound change in the first place. William Labov has done a lot of useful work on separating the two aspects of sound change: its underlying primary mechanism (which produces regularity) and its diffusion in a speech community (and from one community to another) -- and there irregularity is common and each word tends to have its separate history.

> Further Hock's book shows that there are a zillion ways in which sounds change.

If you mean his _Principles of Historical Linguistics_, read Chapter 19 on comparative reconstruction and the importance of the regularity principle in it.