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

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

>
>
> On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, tgpedersen wrote:
> >
> > I don't know why I get this feeling that you are being sarcastic.
>
> I was.
>
> > Let
> > me try to be more precise. Palatals can be depalatalised only if

they

> > occur in alternating paradigms somewhere in the language, in which
> > case they _might_ spread to non-alternating environments. But

without

> > the alternation depalatalisation won't get started in the first

place.

>


> Now that makes the theory a bit easy, doesn't it? Any conditioned

change

> is liable to produce alternation, so how do you get a contrasting

case

> without alternation (*anywhere* in the language, as I now

understand it

> means) showing that lack of alternation blocks all atttempts at
> depalatalisation?

Whew, I was afraid you might have come up with a counter-example.

> Actually, I can easily imagine how speakers can change their

pronunciation

> under the influence of that of others. I believe this is a more

potent

> factor governing the course of language change than any amount of
> paradigmatic alternation.

1) What is it I said that makes you believe that I disregard the
influence of "what other people say" in language change?

2) I don't understand the way you oppose "what other people say" to
paradigmatic alternation. Please be more specific.

> In the case of Danish it was certainly not levelling that caused
> depalatalisation. The correspondence of German <gelten, galt> used

to be

> <gjælde, galdt>; that developed into <gjælde, gjaldt> by levelling,

then

> to present-day <gælde gjaldt> with depalatalisation *against* the

uniform

> picture caused by the earlier levelling.
>

That's right. There was an attempt at levelling which comprised a
very few verbs, before the depalatalisation. They were then caught up
in the depalatalisation (which attempted to regularise 'the other way
round') and became irregular. That doesn't disprove the argument, on
the contrary.

Torsten