From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 41196
Date: 2005-10-10
--- 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.Why don't you think such a situation is unusual? Can you come up with any truly similar examples from any other language in the world?
> 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?
My point here was not primarily that these examples are inexplicable (though they may well be), it is that they serve as examples of how English is atypical of Indo-European languages. Only English among Indo-European languages has examples like these - where originally rhyming words have diverged, with no apparent reason. And yes, you could say that all that says is that English is different in the same way that the word "German" is different from the word "English". But these examples say something else - they say that the word "English" sometimes sounds like "Inglish", sometimes like "Anglish", or sometimes like "Onglish", even though there was only one original form "Englisc" in the parent language, whereas "German" always sounds like "Jurman". Do you understand what I am saying here?
> 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_.
But English spelling is atypical among Indo-European languages. No other Indo-European language has a spelling system that is as inconsistent and exception-rich as does English.
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.But I am recounting all aspects of English that make it nonconforming among Indo-European languages. For example, all Indo-European languages but English have an "i" that is pronounced like our "ee", and "a" is never pronounced /ey/, always "ah" or very similar (e.g. with "long" or "short" subvarieties which are not too divergent from the "ah" sound), among all other Indo-European languages. Also for example, most Indo-European languages changed initial /w/ to /v/. One changed it to /b/, one to /gw/, and in one it disappeared. But all other Indo-European languages changed the sound /w/ in initial position. In this way, English is atypical. Perhaps I am using the wrong word, but I think I am not using "atypical" incorrectly here.
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.
But I pointed out that English's phonological system is atypical not because of the way it is spelled, but also because one original sound in nearly identical phonological environments for some reason developed into two or three different sounds in different words, with no phonological explanation for it. And actually I never even referred to anything as a "phonological system". I always referred to "English", the language. I said that the language English is atypical. Its phonological system as it relates to its spelling and its origin is one feature that contains phenomena that are not shared by other languages. Perhaps you feel I should have used "unique" rather than "atypical"? My point is the same, the words have the same general intent.
> 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?Because no other Indo-European language retained this sound in this position (its commonest position).
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.
As I said before, you don't seem to like the word "atypical". Do you feel I am denigrating English by saying this, or unfairly criticizing it? That is not my intention. I merely like to point out that English is very different from those other Indo-European languages, even though it too is an Indo-European language.
> 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"! :^)
I am trying to convey not that English is different because it is English, but that it is different because certain common phonetic processes have not acted in English, and because certain original phonemes can become up to three new phonemes with no phonological grounds for the divergent development. This is not what happens to phonemes in German or Dutch or French or Spanish or Italian or Russian or Hindi.
It's more like saying that two white parents produced white children in Germany, but produced black children in England. Is that a bit clearer?
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? :^)
Now I feel a little insulted. Why are you tearing into me so deeply? Did I offend you because I find that English is unusual?
> 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".
Yes, you could be very unusual among human beings, but are you more or less unusual than someone who is seven feet nine inches tall?
Andrew Jarrette