I wrote:
>>>Another situation: IF THE LOAN WORD IS CONVERTED IN THE EXPECTED
FASHION WHEN IT IS FIRST INTRODUCED.
You wrote:
>> -- this generally doesn't happen. >>
You subquently wrote:
>-- I should have been more specific. Take an English word like
"night" These days, we pronounce it "nite". Back three or four
centuries, it was pronounced as 'n-ig-cht', roughly the way some
conservative dialects (Lowland Scots, Lallans) did until quite
recently. But if a loan-word with a sound like the original "night"
were introduced _now_, it would not go through the same process; that
sound-shift is over. (Eg., the pronunciation of a German loan-word like
volkerwanderung.) Accent does affect loan-words, but only when the
sound the loan-word contains is no longer present in the recipient
language at all.
I write:
Joatsimeo
I feel like I am getting a mini-lesson in linguistics. I hope you
don't feel your being forced to teach one. I got the sense from the
brevity of the initial reply you would like the last word on this, tell
me and I will shut up. After all, the last word is the least we owe
the true linguists at this site. But I will respond to your last
posting because you haven't told me it was your last word, ......yet.
Using your example of nite, and again taking a HYPOTHETICAL situation.
Assume there was a country "A" unrelated to country "B" but one that
highly interacted with it, which resulted in some linguistic borrowing.
In country A I would show my might, at night, or take flight. But I
spelled that maht, naht, and flaht. In country "B" I listened to
people from country A, learned new concepts from them and when I wrote
a poem using those concepts I wrote I would show my mite, at nite or
take flite. I die - centuries pass - the world moves on.
Along comes a very intelligent and distinguished linguist who has a
collection of writings from country A and B. In country A he notices
that the concepts for Maht and Naht and Flaht are the same for as those
in country B, and there is a consistent change in the writing. So he
makes a rule, the transistion in words from A to B is _att to _ite. NO
HISTORY OF SOUND CHANGE IS TRANSMITTED, BECAUSE HE NEVER HEARD THE
PRONOUNCIATION. BUT IT WAS CRITICAL IN THE CHANGE.
An even more drastic situation:
Assume all this verbal transmissions between A and B happened before
one or both countries had any system of writing. THE SOUNDS ENTER
BEFORE THERE IS EVEN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THERE TO BE AN EVOLUTION IN THE
WRITTEN LANGUAGE. The country(ies) that establish their writing
system(s), would have to invent conventions to express the sounds,
within their established system of verbal communications. So that the
coincident of meanings/writings conventions occurs from the very first.
This is like the case Piotr stated (Karl etc), except much more
drastic. And, I hadn't thought about this before but isn't it
unfortunately exactly the situation that occurs with the earliest
languages? Maybe the relationship being found between the earliest
languages does have more to do with adjacency and interaction than an
expansion of a culture and its diversification into subcultures. At
least if the relationships are assumed on the basis of inheritantly
unstable words. The very thing I was suspicious about in the
Proto-Indic site. ....Hmmm.
Of coarse there is more than language going on between cultures, and
the artifacts, descriptions of people etc. help support the linguists
contentions.
Goodnight
Brent