At 3:11:06 AM on Monday, March 10, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:
> From: Brian M. Scott
>> Happens all the time in ordinary speech: for <cat> a
>> single speaker may say [kæt], [kæ?t], or [kæ?] and
>> never notice that the [t] has disappeared completely
>> from the last. A speaker very likely won't notice that
>> <wouldn't> ['wUdnt] has become [wUnt]. And so on.
> None of your examples is a morpheme
> nor an initial phoneme.
Irrelevant: your objection (which you should not have
snipped, as it provided essential context) was 'I don't
think something can come and go without thought', and I was
responding to what you actually wrote. That none of my
examples involves a morpheme is doubly irrelevant, since it
hasn't been shown that s-mobile is a morpheme. For a
current English example with an initial phoneme you can have
<about> ~ <'bout>, and there are lots more with initial
unstressed vowels. Initial /h/ is also a bit shaky.
In the context of s-mobile, however, your objection itself
seems a bit of a non sequitur. I have in mind a phenomenon
somewhat like the re-analyses that produced English <newt>,
<nuncle>, and <nickname>, and the surnames <Nash>, <Rash>,
and <Noakes>, and I have no idea whether this requires
_individual_speakers_ to use the old and new forms in free
variation.
> It's just colloquialisms.
In other words, it's real language. If that was intended as
an objection to the examples, it's surely one of the
silliest statements that I've seen here -- and that's saying
something.
Brian