"difference" = difficulty; issues; busghetti

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:45 AM -0800 1/2/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>The likelihood is that many such metatheses, as well as other
>important changes, really do reflect the accumulated pressure of
>childhood errors, essentially randomly distributed, that finally
>reach some sort of tipping point at which they are widely repeated
>and perpetuated.
>
>   JL

I willingly grant that language change typically involves errors (or
reanalyses, to be more descriptively correct...) made by children,
given both the limits on accessible information in particular
contexts of occurrence (cf. "bead", "horn") and constraints on the
vocal tract (a.k.a. markedness considerations), but my point was just
to challenge the idea that we want to attribute them to "learning
differences".

LH

>
>
>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Laurence Horn
>Subject: Re: "difference" = difficulty; issues; busghetti
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 6:01 AM -0800 1/2/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>This site identifies signs that your child may have a "learning difference" :
>>
>>  http://www.readingassist.org/traits.htm
>>
>>  One trait: mispronouncing words, like saying "busghetti."
>
>Interesting. No doubt all those metatheses (and no doubt other
>instances of sound change) in the history of language can be
>attributed to children with learning differences...
>
>>Other chracteristics that suggest a mere "difference" are
>>
>>
>>Doesn't know his own strength and may squeeze too tightly.
>>Can't remember his left from his right...gets lost easily.
>>  (As observed earlier, there are no more "problems" or
>>"difficulties," only "challenges," "situations," and "issues." A
>>United ticket agent told me just after the Denver blizzard that DIP
>>"still has issues.")
>>
>>  Surprisingly, Usenet provides fewer than a dozen hits for
>>"busghetti" and "busgetti" combined, none earlier than 2000. I first
>>noticed it about 1995. I don't have it handy, but I've seen a
>>printed ex. in one of Barbara Park's extremely popular "Junie B.
>>Jones" books.
>>
>>  JL
>>
>Alternate spellings are possible, sometimes reflecting alternate
>pronunciations: pisket(t)i, pisg(h)eti, etc.
>
>LH
>
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