Re: Re[5]: [tied] Mille (thousand)

Real language? That seems to be your standard argument to explain any
variation.

Really "real" language is people learning to pronounce and understand the
words of their language to enable more efficient communication.

But, if you will forgive me, your other arguments seems "silly" to me.

Speakers just snap on initial [s]'s, willy-nilly. You cannot really believe
that!

If it was not a morpheme, regardless of the lack of agreement on what it
might have meant, there would simply be no motivation outside of something
like Pig Latin for doing such a thing.

No motivation, no deed.

And your "re-analysis" proposal desperately needs re-analysis.

If you cannot explain the mechanics of it, I would say your proposal is less
than considerable.


AND for once, Arnaud has made a valid point. Your examples are not morphemes
(which *s- certainly was) and not were initial.




Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
To: "fournet.arnaud" <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 10:37 AM
Subject: Re[5]: [tied] Mille (thousand)


> 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
>
>
>