07-01-04 14:52, tgpedersen wrote:
> I offer something by way of explanation. You offer nothing of the
> kind, except the intervention of an autonomous agent, The Rule, like
> a Deus ex machina.
There may be no simple explanation when stochastic processes are
involved. If you throw a dice and get a five in the first roll, it's
little use asking "why a five"? You can be reasonably sure that if you
throw the dice 120 times, you'll get about 20 fives, give or take a
couple, and that there'll be no sevens or eights, but you can't predict
the result of the next roll with an expectation of success greater than
0.166....
> No. The South adopted the unpractical <-en> exactly _because_ the
> North adopted the practical <-es>; cf the reaction of Caxton's woman.
Nonsense. By the time Caxton was telling the story, <-es> was the only
productive plural in the South as well as the North. <eyren> was an
isolated Kentish dialecticism. What puzzled "the good wife" was A SINGLE
FORM (<eyren> as opposed to <egges>), not a systemic contrast (<-en> as
opposed to <-es>) -- it wasn't the plural suffix that was unfamiliar to
her, but the whole word <egges>. While we're at it, <-en> and <-es> were
both equally practical as plural markers; they were like two alleles of
a similar adaptive value, competing for survival. Such a situation is
inherently unstable and one of the alleles is bound to spread at the
expense of the other, sooner or later. <-en> might have won, but the
initially greater frequency of <-es> probably decided the otcome. Even
at the time when <-en> enjoyed its heyday in the South, the original
strong masculines (probably the largest declension) on the whole kept
their plural <-es>, and the ending was also spreading to original neuter
plurals, where the inherited ending was zero (or schwa). The expansion
of <-en> affected more typically OE minor declensions (hence the
surviving forms <brethren> and <children>. In other words, they BOTH
expanded in the same dialect at the expense of the rarer types.
> In that case your position is; Birds have wings, birds are not bats,
> therefore bats don't have wings.
No. Think before you write. My position is that the development of wings
in birds and bats was an independent development in each case. Bats
didn't get their wings from contact with birds.
> Allright, partial creolisation, then.
Creolisation of a single subsystem, leaving other, even more complex
subsystems unaffected? Why was it just the case system that was simplified?
> "Natural", in your terms, doesn't seem to mean much.
> "Random evolutionary drift"? Perhaps you should run your definition
> of terms past Darwin first? Or else, if you persist in your metaphor,
> you should offer an explanation of how "survival of the fittest"
> enters into your picture of linguistic change.
It isn't just a metaphor. Whenever you have things that replicate and
compete for limited resources, similar principles will apply. But the
neo-Darwinian model of evolution is not all about the survival of the
fittest. Genetic drift is an important factor in it, since most
mutations are now known to be selectively neutral.
Piotr