--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
> May I make mention of English "mood" "food", "hood", "good",
> "blood", "flood", with three different vowels, all from
> words which originally rhymed. What reason is there for that,
For specific answers to each of these, you would have to
ask an English expert - I'm not particularly interested in
English myself - but I don't think that such a situation
is really all that unusual.
> and what other language has undergone a similar threefold
> change? Or "weak" and "steak" with originally rhyming vowels,
> or "break" and "leak" with originally rhyming vowels, or
> "great" and "threat" with originally rhyming vowels - and the
> list goes on. What other language has similar phenomena?
Without knowing all of the sound changes in the history of
English, I have no way of knowing whether some or all of
your examples have phonetic or analogical explanations or
not. Although even those that don't may well be explained
by dialect mixture or incomplete sound changes?
> Plus spellings like "ough" with its myriad pronunciations.
But as I wrote before, a spelling system is not a language.
The only justification you have in citing English spelling
is the manner in which it, having fossilized, is a reminder
of past sound changes in English, not as a linguistically
atypical feature itself of the English _language_. Properly,
you should cite only those sound changes which you consider
atypical, not the spelling system that merely _happens_ to
reflect and remind us of some of those changes.
If we took the speakers of another language, such as Hindi,
Spanish, or Korean, whose speakers presently use a rational
writing system, and made them use instead one as irregular
as that now used for English, would we be able to claim that
that language had thereafter assumed an atypical phonological
system? No, of course we would not.
> And I think English "r" is highly atypical, as I have
> mentioned already, and English is also atypical among
> Indo-European languages in preserving /w/ in initial
> position.
If the inclusion of initial /w/ in the sound system of
the language in its earlier stages wasn't odd, then why
is its accidental retention atypical of a later stage?
That which you're claiming to be _atypical_ about English,
however, is actually only _characteristic_ of English
_alone_, which is really something different. To describe
English as you do implies that it's typologically highly
aberrant, which I don't believe you've proven, and which
it has never been my impression is so, although admittedly
not as an expert of any sort on English.
> What other Indo-European language has these characteristics?
Well obviously, without a unique _set_ of characteristics,
English wouldn't qualify as a separate language. The point
however was that none of those features is itself atypical
in linguistic terms. It's like saying that German's extremely
unusual because absolutely no other known language spells
its name "G-e-r-m-a-n"! :^)
Likewise, you probably don't look exactly like any other
human on Earth, but that doesn't mean that you don't look
human. Does it? :^)
> Moreover the fact that it's called "English" though at least 60%
> of its vocabulary is French or Latin, if not more, though I am
> aware that languages such as Albanian and Farsi also have a high
> foreign content.
But linguists don't assign any language to a family on the
basis of loanwords.
> As well its currency as the prevalent international language.
But that of course is no more than an accident of history:
the success of England and some of its colonies. Nothing
about the English language itself encouraged its widespread
adoption.
> I think the combination of these characteristics makes English
> quite unusual among modern languages.
But of course, and just as I say, without a unique set of
characteristics _nothing_ has an individual identity, and
so following your usage every language now spoken could be
said to be "quite unusual among modern languages".
David