Re: [tied] Re: Daci

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 1:28 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Daci

But a general remark: It seems to me you often use the argument that since we can't conclude on linguistic grounds that something has happened, then it would be unscientific to assume it did, and therefore it didn't happen, also given pertinent extra-linguistic evidence that it might have happened. Case in point: the possible identity of the Getae and the Goths. (Trying to represent your position:) If they spoke dissimilar languages we cannot entertain the possibility that they might have been the same people (wholy or partly) and therefore Jordanes is definitely wrong if he claims they were.

 

If there were any good evidence of any kind supporting tht claim, I wouldn't be obstructive. But your argument was based on a collection of linguistic _and_ extralinguistic implausibilities -- a real comedy of errors resulting from the misidentification of accidentally similar names (see also George's most recent posting). Sorry, but I don't feel like discussing it all once again.

 

>> What was once "pre-" may easily become "post-" (witness East Scandinavian articles).

 

> You mean North Germanic outside of West Jutland, I suppose? Correct, if you think that the suffixed article started with -inn.

Thanks for the correction. As for the suffixed article, it _started_ with <h-> originally (ON <hinn, hin, hit>) but lost the initial when agglutinated to a noun. The position of demonstratives in early Germanic was predominantly (albeit not exclusively) prenominal, and it was only in North Germanic that the fixed combination *dagr-hinn > dagr-inn developed as an alternative to <hinn dagr> and the enclitic began to function as an article.

 

>> The functionalist claim that a language will not permit "indispensable" morphemes to undergo phonological erosion is empirically falsified by numerous cases in which a theoretically "undesirable" change does occur. How would you determine, as a linguist, which elements are really superfluous (or, for that matter, which are indispensable and cannot be lost)? If you argue a posteriori that "X must have been superfluous because it disappeared", the argument becomes a circular pseudo-explanation.

> If you can't determine, as a linguist, which elements are really superfluous, how would you determine what is theoretically "undesirable"?

 

I would not want to determine it at all, hence the quotes. Languages (or their speakers) certainly don't "desire" change. Anyone's first language is a historical given, not something that one can shape and change if one so wishes. Some types of change are common and can be regarded as natural, others are rare, but the most commonly occurring ones don't necessarily "optimise" language structure in any sense, or make the language more efficient, more beautiful or more something-else (in terms of some global directionality). The palatalisation of velars before front vowels or weak-vowel deletion are examples of commonplace changes that can play havoc with the morphology. People let them happen nonetheless and don't seem to worry about the consequences -- even a royal decree against sloppy pronunciation would not help :)

 

 

> As for gender disappearing, a few facts. In Dutch and in the East North Germanic languages genders have been reduced to two: common and neuter. In West Jutland genders have been reduced further to one, as in English. But in parts of Jutland, there is a transitional situation: grammatiacal gender has been replaced by functional gender: common gender is used for countables <den hus>, neuter for non-countables. Thus also partly in standard Danish: <den oel> "that (bottle of) beer" vs <det oel> "that beer" (eg. spilled on the table). In other words: Since the division masculine/feminine was useless, it could be given up, but between speakers of various Germanic dialects, parts of the distinction common/neuter could be put to sensible use (eg the articles <den> vs. <det>) and therefore did not disappear. In a situation where a non-Germanic substrate or superstrate language was involved, the whole system collapsed, since they would have clue as to what should be grammatically common and what neuter gender, based on Germanic.

 

Contact may accelerate change because it increases variation (through code-switching, borrowing and various forms of cross-language interference in the speech of bilinguals), but even geographically isolated languages undergo change and experience systemic collapses from time to time. It is also true that linguistic "driftwood" (the junk produced by language change, consisting of loose fragments of earlier structure) may become recycled or exapted, and get a new life in a new function. What I have argued, however, is that there are no conservation laws protecting grammatical categories and their functions, and that speakers do not assess the "usefulness" of the present or future structural state of their language in order to decide if they should opt for or against language change.

>> You make phonological change sound like a kind of weathering, doing things to people's language which they are powerless to control. I don't believe that.

Ever heard of enthropy? The phonological form of morphemes and words typically decays with the flow of time. The rate of erosion is uneven, but what's been lost generally doesn't come back (except in special cases like spelling-pronunciations, which can be regarded as sui generis loans from written language). Articulatory strengthening is on the whole rarer than lenition and assimilation. Do you think the French changed [akwa], [augustus], [faktus] and [wi:ginti:] to [o], [u], [fE] and [vE~] through some kind of conscious language engineering (or other motivated behaviour) rather than mechanical lenition? This doesn't mean that languages move from perfection to corruption, because morphemes can be combined in novel ways. As a result, new structure emerges, restoring morphological complexity.

 

Piotr