--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
> There is no other language on Earth, I
> believe, that has general English /r/ in non-preconsonantal or
> pre-codal position (I have heard a similar /r/ in preconsonantal
> position in Dutch, and Mandarin has a somewhat similar /r/ but
> I think this too is only postvocalic). I deeply wonder what
> possible reason there is for English being so extremely atypical
> among modern languages, and why would /r/ change in a direction
> opposite to that of almost every other language on the planet.
> But then I think that's to be expected in a language where "long
> i" is phonetically /ay/, "long e" is /i:/, and "long a" is /ey/ -
> what other language that uses the Roman alphabet has such values
> for the vowels?
But what does the spelling system traditionally used for
a language have to do with the nature of that language
itself? Other languages have gone through series of vowel
changes no less convoluted than those of English, the
only difference being that their writing systems have been
periodically updated, or else they've undergone no major
sound changes in the time since they first began to be
written.
I've never really made any deep study of English, but in
all my reading over the years I've never come across any
mention of English posessing _any_ linguistically atypical
features, much less of it being "extremely atypical among
modern languages" as you would put it. There are several
students of English on this list who will please correct
me on that if I'm wrong.
The only real mystery about English is why it hasn't been
provided with a better writing system by now.
> Now, I must learn about Nostratic - I am completely ignorant
> in this field. So it is generally accepted that Arabic is
> indeed related to Indo-European?
No, it is not. The existence, and various reconstructions,
of Proto-Nostratic stand on grounds in no way as solid as
those upon which Proto-Indo-European stands. The former is
an interstesting idea, while the latter is a proven fact.
It isn't methodologically proper for any claims about Proto-
Nostratic to influence our reconstruction of Proto-Indo-
European.
Sadly too, Nostratics seems to be especially attractive to
"monad chasers". :^(
David