Re: Directionality of Sound changes

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 556
Date: 2003-08-14

--- In phoNet@yahoogroups.com, "H. Mark Hubey" <HubeyH@M...> wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@n...>
> Date: Thursday, August 14, 2003 8:43 am
> Subject: [phoNet] Re: Directionality of Sound changes
>
> > <html><body>

What's happened to your (Mark's) mail system? It's very confusing to
have to read "&ht" for ">"!
> > Were the asterisks needed at
> >
> > <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-1627.html>? Is it
> > possible
> >
> > that the mazurzenie dialects never had hushes?
> >
>
> If I am wondering about classifying various changes
> into some rules and wondering what kind of changes take
> place for what reason so that I can use to results for
> judging reconstructions, for what reason would I use
> reconstructed sound changes other than so that future
> reconstructions will be just like past reconstructions'
> done by some people?

I appreciate your reason for rejecting reconstructed sound changes as
raw data. I was asking if there were evidence of the nature of the
change beyond the dialect picture. That there was a merger of hushes
and hisses had seemed blindingly obvious until I remembered how the
French soft "c" is /s/ whereas we have Picard /tS/ or /S/ (I'm not
sure which) and Italian and Romanian /tS/. However, the French path
seems to have been [k] > [k'] > [ts] > [s] before front vowels, so
caution might indeed be justified in the mazurzenie case. On the
other hand, French was not alone in developing [ts] from soft "c".
However, documentary evidence *might* shed some light on the history
of mazurzenie.

Richard.
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