>>So we conclude that the accent patterns were once less complex and
>>automatic unconscious processes worked to complicate the accentuation.
>>
>>(Say yes if you agree at this point)
>
>I do not agree. Normally phonological rules gets more and more
>general, i.e. simpler, over time. You won't get me to insist on the
>opposite as a basic principle.
Egad, Jens is in more need of help than I thought... Nurse Betty, get me 1cc
of morphine... oh, yes and some for my patient here too...
Your statement shows that you're assuming the more complex before the
simpler. The cart before the horse. I can't be clearer than this. What you
say doesn't make sense in the universe we live in.
There is naturally a _simpler_ point in the past, however far back in the
past.
People who develop sensible theories aren't interested in complexity because
they would never get anywhere. Imagine if Einstein was searching for
_complexity_ of simplicity in his theories of space-time. Well, we'd
probably
never hear of some guy named "Einstein" because he'd be too busy crouched
in the corner rocking back and forth of the same problem for 40 years.
To answer how the accent came to be as it is in IE, we aren't concerned
with a more _complex_ accent in the past!! We're trying to _solve_ the
origin
of the accent, not drown ourselves in more what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs!!
To give a real-world example, we have the strange English paradigm
is/be/were. The paradigm is learnt, not automatic. It was _simpler_ in the
past: We have three verbs *es-, *wes- and *bHeu- that have not yet
merged into a hodgepodge paradigm because English doesn't yet exist.
We unravel the complexity to reveal greater simplicity. This is Occam's
Razor at work.
Your solution would be to assume that there were once MORE arcane
forms of "to be", perhaps *zonk, *hoqui, and *yahaa that alternated
with "is", "be" and "were", because as you say, things were more
complicated in the past. Utterly stupid.
I have to throw away the rest of the post because we're obviously not
agreeing on fundamentals and it's disturbing me.
- gLeN
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