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

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, tgpedersen wrote:

>
> 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.

You did that implicitly by insisting on alternation being the cause of
depalatalisation, when simple copying of the speech of speakers who had
not yet palatalised could do it alone. That strips the alternation
argument of its cogency.

> > 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.

It shows its lack of relevance.

Jens