At 5:23:07 AM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> Privately I was aware that I was ignoring these
> dialectal features. I should have specified that I meant
> "standard languages".
Why? A standard language is typically in large part the
result of historical accidents. Standard English would
doubtless be quite different had York been the political and
commercial centre of England, and similarly with standard
French and, say, Bordeaux. It appears that you're
arbitrarily throwing out data that are incompatible with
your hypothesis.
Brian