--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 1:13 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Daci
>
> [Piotr:] >> ... 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 :)
>
> [Torsten:] > You are merely restating your position. And Danish has
restored <sj> - <sk>, even without royal decree. Worry about
consequences may lead to restoring paradigms.
>
> [Piotr:] Correct me if I'm wrong, but what we have here is a
puristic fashion imposed "from above" with the help of the
educational system, not the usual kind of spontaneous change "from
below".
You are wrong, and I have corrected you on that point before. The
only thing in Danish history I could possibly identify with your
invented "puristic fashion", is the speech habits of the German-
speaking upper layer of Denmark at the time when the Danish monarchy
comprised also German-speaking Holstein and mixed Danish-German
Scleswig and when one third of the inhabitants of Copenhagen were
German-speaking. But such a mixed situation is common in the world,
and therefore the "retrograde" changes that took place in Danish are
mainstream, not an exception. A parallel example: Norwegians changed
their written language back from Danish with characteristic b, d, g
(B, D, G, as in Spanish) to the more "authentic" Norwegian p, t, k,
when in a cultural struggle in the union with Sweden (1814-1905).
Danish b, d, g wouldn't do as a shibboleth marker, since almost no
Norwegians pronounced them that way.
Such determined attempts occasionally succeed (cf. the English
spelling-pronunciation of [h-] in French loans, originally
hypercorrect) but play a very marginal role in the evolution of
languages.
Sorry, but whatever "determined attempts" you imagine, they have left
no marks in Danish history. Not that we are incapable of linguistic
squabbles. The suggestion of the abolition of capital letter in nouns
(as in German) and the introduction of Swedish /å/ for Danish /aa/
produced a humongous row that lasted fo at least fifty years only to
be resolved by it being introduced formally after the war, in 1948.
Whatever motivated it, it was not the desire of the man in the street
to prevent the corruption of grammatical paradigms (the replacement
was not morphologically conditioned).
It was.
cf Swedish skæra <s^æra> "cut", skar <skar>, skurit <skyrit> with
Danish skære <skær&> "cut", skar <skar>, skåret <skor&D>
Also, it certainly did not _prevent_ the palatalisation of old /sk/
(which had happened earlier, unresisted) but merely
imposed "restored" <sk> as a substitute for the already palatalised
sequence.
And?
> ----------
>
> [Torsten:] > ... I provided an example of the disappearance of
grammatical categories being determined by their usefulness,
whereupon you restate your position.
>
> [Piotr:] You presented another circular argument: what was entirely
lost was allegedly "useless" and what was recycled was "useful". The
common/neuter distinction did not survive with anything like its
original distribution.
Not so. Standard Danish has both grammatical gender and uses it at
the same time to mark countable/uncountable. In other languages you
see something similar. Let's say someone spilled water on the floor.
Would you, in Polish, then refer to the spilled beer as "ta" or "to"
(I assume it is?)?
It was only its formal markers that were employed in a completely new
function (countable/uncountable) in some dialects. You could say that
they _became_ useful after the fact (since a new use was found for
them), but not that their survival was determined by their inherent
usefulness (since their original function was lost).
No. See above
>
> ----------
>
> [Piotr:] >> Ever heard of entropy?
>
> [Torsten:] > Yes, in the context of physics.
>
> [Piotr:] Phonological naturalness is in a great part a matter of
the physics of articulation. The tendency to maximise the "ease of
articulation" is a manifestation of growing entropy.
>
I see. Using this metaphor backwards, perhaps you could argue that
there were several kinds of physical entropy, and we could never
foretell which one prevailed?
> ----------
>
>
>
> Piotr