From: Rick McCallister
Message: 48482
Date: 2007-05-09
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallisterhttp://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
> <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
> >
> > So, what constraints produce these variations?
> >
> > Why four, five, wolf vs. why?
> > and Russian chetyre vs pyat?
> >
>
> Swedes speaking English have tendency to replace
> English /j/ with /y/.
> I think the reason is that j (d3) vs y (and c^ vs
> �) is a social and
> geographical shibboleth in Swedish, the former being
> rustic (Finnish
> Swedish) and declass�. Similarly English
> English-speakers tend to
> diphthongize long vowels even when speaking foreign
> languages,
> presumably because the low-status Scottish and Irish
> varieties of
> English don't diphthongize long vowels. I think this
> is a general
> priciple. Somehow you can't get your brain to accept
> that those
> foreigners really in earnest insist on speaking like
> the despised
> yokels of your own country so you want to help them
> along on their
> pronounciation.
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________________________
> I imagine that in a situation in western(?) PIE
> where both p and kW
> existed depending on dialect and sociolect there has
> developed a drift
> to prefer one over the other (but not necessarily
> consistently). Note
> that Latin replaces p with kW in the presense of
> another kW: quinque,
> quercus, coquere (*penkW-, *perkW-, *pekW-), so to
> speak as an over-
> reaction to the presence of p-varieties *penp-,
> *perp-, *pep-.
> De-Oscanization, one might call it.
>
>
> Torsten
>
>
>