----- Original Message -----Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 8:58 PMSubject: Re: [phoNet] English by the book.Historical phonology is just what I do for a living. If I need a metric for measuring the "phonetic distance" between different historical stages of a language, my instinctive choice is the number of identifiable regular sound changes operating between those stages. They are relatively easy to count, and the metric so defined is like the one used by evolutionary biologists to determine the evolutionary distance between various species. I could do a rough comparative calculation for a few languages, covering, say, the past 500 years. If two languages are related, i.e. derived from a common ancestor, we can define the distance between them as the sum of both distances associated with their separate lineages.My judgement, which is certainly subjective but based on much practical experience, is that the evolution of a particular language may accelerate or slow down quite at random (though SOME sound change in progress can always be observed); external events like prolonged contacts with a different language (leading to bilingualism, borrowing, etc.), civilisational changes, migrations or new sociogeographic patterns definitely favour temporary acceleration. English has frequently been subject to such influences, as have nearly all other European languages.Polish as spoken about AD 1500 was phonetically rather different from Modern Polish, especially as regards its vowel system, location of stress, and the pronunciation of several consonant phonemes.The distance between Classical and Modern Greek (Dimotikí) is considerable, and to the extent that conservative orthographic features are deliberately preserved, the gap between spelling and pronunciation is quite wide. For example, ι, η, υ, ει, οι, υι are all pronounced [i] as a result of massive vowel mergers. There are also a number of ambiguous spellings like word-internal -ντ- [nd ~ d ~ nt], as in πέντε ['pende], αντίο [a'dio] 'see you', νταντέλλα [dan'tela].Piotr
Our discussion so far, however, has been nothing but an exchange
of opinions. It would be interesting to have some more precise and
verifiable data based on maths/stats. Do you, Piotr, or does anyone
of phoNet-icians know about such studies of the phonetic distance
between languages, or between various stages of one particular
language? Comparative studies could be also of interest. What would
you say for example about the phonetic distance between Modern Polish
and, say, 15th cent. Polish vs. the same (or perhaps another period)
for English? Or Byzantine and Modern Greek? How could it be measured?
And what about measuring the distance between spelling and
pronunciation?