The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer@...>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > I think palatalised must mean something that can be de-
> > palatalised (unlike palatal), it must have a rubber band attached;
> > which is: participation in a paradigm in which that sound (velar)
> > alternates between palatalised and non-palatal, eg Swedish <ge> (<
> > <giva>) /je/ : <gav> /gav/, in Danish depalatalised <give> /gi/ :
> > <gav> /ga/ 'give':'gave'. In other words, I think de-

palatalisation

> > is caused by regularisation and nothing else.
>
> What alternation led to depalatalization of the initial of

Kjøbenhavn?

>

I didn't repeat the whole theory. The idea is that from a binary
alternation it is possible to generalize/regularise in two ways,
which will give rise to a 'shibboleth relationship' between the two
alternatives, which then will spread to the rest of the language. In
the given case, the depalatalisation that was made presumably by the
large urban German-speaking population in Denmark in order to
overcome the difficulties in verbal etc inflection, spread from there
to all palatal velars, also that of <Kjøbenhavn>. See

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html

Torsten

The idea is