From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 54976
Date: 2008-03-10
> From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>Read it again: that wasn't an explanation. It was a
>> 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.
> Real language? That seems to be your standard argument to
> explain any variation.
> Really "real" language is people learning to pronounce andThere's a great deal more to language behavior than
> understand the words of their language to enable more
> efficient communication.
> But, if you will forgive me, your other arguments seemsA neat trick, that, since I didn't actually make an
> "silly" to me.
> Speakers just snap on initial [s]'s, willy-nilly. YouI don't. Speakers don't just snap on initial [n]'s
> cannot really believe that!
> If it was not a morpheme, regardless of the lack ofSo /n-/ in <nickname>, <newt>, <Nash>, etc. must be a
> agreement on what it might have meant, there would simply
> be no motivation outside of something like Pig Latin for
> doing such a thing.