Re: Optional Soundlaws (was: IE *aidh- > *aus-tr- 'hot, warm (wind)'

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
> I would have to be a phonological hippie to buy into the notion of "optional soundlaws". No rocket science is required to see that any word in any language could be derived from any word in the same or any other language, merely by tailoring the "optional soundlaws" to achieve the desired result. Philology would collapse into anarchy.

While acknowledging an optional sound law is an admission of defeat, and any explanation that depends on one is thereby weakened, they do appear to be real. Good examples of optional sound laws include:

1) The Modern English 3-way split of the reflex of OE o:, e.g. Modern English _blood_, _good_ and _mood_.

I would ask if this split is universal or only limited to Southern and Midlands English. I heard /blud/ (rhyming with American "good", not /bl@.../ in Liverpool and to a lesser degree on the Isle of Man. Yet, to my American ear, in Chester,, only a half hour away on the train, it sounded like they were speaking "The Queens'." My guess is that it is not universal throughout England and Scotland and that individual choices were made among different dialects, that the masses chose elite forms when those acquired some type of prestige or cachet, i.e. as in "varsity" vs. university, glamour vs. grammar, etc.

Remember that in NYC there is the marry /meR-iy/, merry mE-Riy/ and Mary mAE-riy/ split, but in Midwestern, Southern and Appalachian, it's all /meR-iy/ BTW: Does this split exist in the UK?

2) Classical Latin /ae/ merging with /e:/ ('rustic') or /e/ in Romance.

This happened in Vulgar Latin, didn't it? Before Romance split up? Again, it may have been that the poor, hearing Vulgar at home and Classical from the elite, selected between the two.

There is very strong evidence that mergers initially progress word by word, and that offers a very good opportunity for an optional sound law to arise as an incomplete change or for the order of sound laws to be variable, as in _blood_ v. _good_, where it seems that shortening at different times has led to different vowels in present-day Modern English.

Richard.