🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan9.005144.10836@midway.uchicago.edu>, deb5@ellis (Daniel von Brighoff) writes:

>As a linguistics undergrad at the University of Chicago, I learned that the
>principle balancing out "majority rules" is "phonetic plausibility."  Applying
>this to the Romance example, we notice that although there are several
>documented cases of the change /k/ -> /s/,/sh/ (e.g. the division of
>Proto-Indo-European into `centum' and s'atem languages, based on whether
>inherited */k/ remains /k/ (as in Italic) or palatalises to /sh/ (as in
>Slavic)), there is no (to my knowledge) example of a regular change in the
>reverse direction, i.e. /s/ becoming /k/.  Thus, we decide on a /k/ to /s/
>change as being the only plausible explanation.  So think of "plausiblity" as
>being a more general "majority rules" principle which serves to limit the
>first one.

Talk to Eric Hamp about the Albanian change I mentioned in my followup to this
query.

>Now, the downside:  if this argument seems circular, it's because (as faras
>this example goes), it is.  Many of our guidelines for phonetic plausiblity
>were developed through work on the Indo-European languages, in large part
>because it afforded written sources old enough for us to check our hypotheses
>(and, of course, Europeans were the first to use it extensively).  However, if
>certain phonetic changes common to I-E turn out to be _specific_ to it, we may
>become guilty of overgeneralisation in our attempts to see them at work in
>other language families.

With the amount of work that has been done in, for example, the languages of
the Americas, I think any overgeneralizations would have come to light 50 years
or more ago.  _Pace_ some readers of this newsgroup, linguists *as a group* are
not so hide-bound as to reject evidence set before them in systematic fashion.

>After all, like most sciences, historical reconstruction is still an inexact
>one (which is why them *'s come in so darn handy : >).

The inexactitude lies not in the science, but in the historicity, of the
discipline.

But sometimes I wish that the asterisk was in the home row on my keyboard. :->
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_