--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> Date: Wed Mar 20, 2002 12:10 pm
> Subject: Re: Daci
>
> [Torsten:] > 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.
>
> [Piotr:] No, Torsten. The mainstream of sound change is the sort of
thing that occurs essentially unnoticed, has little or no
sociolinguistic relevance and does not turn back. As for your Danish
<sk>ibbolethisation (sorry for not remembering the socio-political
details the first time): if something of this kind happens, the
target of _deliberate_ replacement is an arbitrarily selected feature
that attracts public awareness and social stigma -- a shibboleth.
People have no sort of global control over their language; they focus
on a detail at a time.
>
[Torsten, 2:] I think perhaps the problem is I expressed myself
imprecisely. What I meant, and should have written, is that this type
of change is *within* the mainstream, not that (as what I wrote might
be understood) that it *is* the mainstream.
> ----------
>
> [Piotr:] >> 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).
>
> [Torsten:] > It was.
> cf Swedish skæra <s^æra> "cut", skar <skar>, skurit <skyrit> with
> Danish skære <skær&> "cut", skar <skar>, skåret <skor&D>
>
> [Piotr:] Was it? It levelled out the paradigms to be sure, but I
gather it took place elsewhere as well, and the fact that the process
depalatalised the initial of <sky> 'aspic' "by mistake" but did not
affect words like <chocolade> shows it to be essentially a spelling
pronunciation.
[Torsten, 2:] No. The reason we don't find any <skokolaD&> is that
the general uncertainty was between the <sj-> of the dialect that
palatalized and the <sk-> of those that didn't. And no dialect
produced *<sko-> from <sjo-> (On the other hand, Adam Oehlenschlæger
(note the name! Our national composers before Nielsen had names like
Weyse, Heise, Kunzen and Kuhlau), our local Mickiewicz, notes in his
memoirs that some old people in his childhood pronounced <sjorte> and
<sjold> for present <skjorte> "shirt" and <skjold> "shield", which
would tend to corroborate your claim). However, in 19th century low
Copenhagen for <sersjánt> you find <skersánt> "sergeant" (<sersjánt> -
> <sjersjánt> -> <sjersánt> with sj- alternating with sk-. I find
also interesting that someone mentioned that Krivichian, I think it
was, had both <s^iling> and <skiling> as loanwords. Perhaps there was
individual alternation and choice already then, in which case perhaps
one should revise the standard rule in English etymology of "s^-
Anglo-Saxon, sk- Norse".
And besides, who is this "man in the street"? A monoglot Dane? A
German who learned Danish as a grown-up as a language to speak to
less cultured people, and who has no palatalisation in his own
language and no motivation to learn the finer points thereof?
>
> ----------
>
> [Torsten:] > 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?)?
>
> [Piotr:] In which other languages, namely? Not in Polish, at any
rate, or anywhere else in Slavic, as far as I know. 'A (pint of)
beer' is <piwo> (neuter), and beer spilt on the floor (what a shame!)
is still <piwo> (neuter). With a demonstrative, it's always <to
piwo>, just as 'water' is always <(ta) woda> (feminine, unless it is
miraculously transformed into beer), and 'juice' is always <(ten)
sok> (masculine).
>
I thought up the example with "beer" first, when I suddenly recalled
that <piwo> is neuter (trust a foreigner to learn that much Slavic)
and decided to substitute with "water". But when replacing "beer"
with "water" I overlooked a "beer", which made the whole paragraph
pointless. I corrected that later in a follow-up.
> ----------
>
> [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.
>
> [Torsten:] > 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:] No, there is only one kind, which means that any
articulatorily grounded phonological process has a preferred
("natural") direction. For example, [-mt] > [-nt] is far more common
than [-nt] > [-mt], the intervocalic voicing of [-s-] > [-z-] is
likelier than [-z-] > [-s-] in the same context, etc. The Celtic
erosion series of *p- > *f- > *h- > Ø (zero) is also known from other
languages (e.g., all its stages are attested in the various Oceanic
languages, and PIE *p- > Arm. h-), but I haven't yet seen a language
in which Ø (or even [h-]) > [p-] by regular sound change.
>
[Torsten, 2:]
Yes, I know. I was only pointing out the limitations in your metaphor.
> Regular fortitions, which are statistically rarer than lenitions
and so are likely to get swamped by the latter in the long run, are
perception-, not articulation-oriented -- we inject some extra
information, as it were, into selected points of the segmental
string. Such reinforcement is costly in terms of muscular effort and
neuromotor control, so we resort to it sparingly, whatever the gain.
[Torsten, 2:]
Indeed. But I still think that the mechanism I proposed in
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
provides at least some of the driving force behind change. And the
good thing is, since it glues some many events together, applications
of it are eveidently falsifiable, as they should be.
> Piotr
Torsten