Re: [tied] Estimated timeframe from albanian s->sh transformation

Hello Piotr,

" but an innovation like the one we're discussing is likely to take
decades rather than centuries. "

Sorry again, but I find above just another afirmation with no
arguments after it. Is there an issue to put the arguments after any
afirmation like this?

P.S. "global shift" :
I mean "a process that at its end, globally affected ALL the
Albanian population (so its not a dialectal changed that could affect
only a smaller or a greater geographic area )".

I apologize for my English.



--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 29-01-04 17:10, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
>
> > I didn't compare apple with orange. I said ONLY that a

global

> > shift like s->sh took at least twice the time when a loan spread,
> > because the speed of this second process is very very small at

the

> > beginning:
>
> A GLOBAL shift? What do you mean?
>
> > Why?
> > If I hear you saying a word with 'sh' this doesn't mean that

I

> > will say it too...I prefer to speak it, as I heard to my parents

or

> > to my friends. If everybody speak around me, with /sh/ , I will

make

> > the shift too, but this is the final point of this process and

not

> > the initial one.
> > This is in contradiction with a loan situation: if I see
> > a 'mouse' in your hands , I will ask you which is its name, and I
> > will used that name immediately.
> > At least these are some basic arguments ...and I not said like

you:

> > "So that's how long it can take."
>
> The rate at which innovations spread in a speech community has been
> studied by dialectologists and sociolinguists. We don't know how

large

> the ancestral population of Albanian-speakers was (in demographic

or

> geographic terms), so any estimate can only be rough, but an

innovation

> like the one we're discussing is likely to take decades rather than
> centuries. The phonetic precursor of the change, i.e. the variable
> retraction of /s/ without phonological consequences, may have

preceded

> the shift proper by a long time, but that's something we'll never

know.

>
> Piotr