From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 41236
Date: 2005-10-10
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.
-- But the vast majority of Danish speakers have /v/; only a small minority have /w/ instead. In English, on the other hand, /w/ is universal and standard. And I am making my comments on the language as it is in reality today, not what could have been or might have been - I think those are irrelevant. I am only throwing out data that doesn't exist.
Andrew