<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 6.5.7652.24">
<TITLE>'Reversed change' dialect borrowing</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<!-- Converted from text/plain format -->
<BR>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Thanks fot the references, Sally. I am not sure how ‘deliberate’ ‘reversed-change’ is. Obviously it can be, as in your example, but could be at a lower conscious level in some cases too. The example I am dealing with also has an incident of this ‘surfacing’ to consciousness /public attention (to use the Boas/Sapir/Labov metaphorical schema) – but in a different way from what you describe - relayed to me by Felicity Meakins who works with the same groups I do. In the Eastern Ngumpin languages there has been regular intervocalic lenition so for instance *ngapa ‘water’ became ngawa, but many other words have been retained or readopted as unlenited forms. Now recently some children had started to borrow ‘ngapa’ from non-leniting neighbours, but this became a matter of conscious discussion and stigmatisation in the community and it disappeared again. So this is ‘covert prestige’/local pride acting rather than adopting a ‘prestige’ form, and the conscious step is the blocking not so much the adoption.<BR>
<BR>
A propos of this, Claire Bowern privately told me she thought ‘prestige’ is/was involved in some language change in Indigenous Australia. I don’t really doubt this although ‘prestige’ is a fuzzy concept that usually needs unpacking and espccially when used inf very different non-Western contexts – apart from there being hierarchies of competing ‘prestiges’ in many cases. That’s what I meant to say, not that ‘prestige’ (whatever it means) is not a factor in Indigenous Australia. In this particular case I don’t know what the ‘prestige’ factors might have been that caused people to do a lot of ‘reversed changes’ (without totally converting the lexicon). It’s not at all obvious and I don’t want to make up a ‘just-so’ story about what happened hundreds of years ago <BR>
<BR>
Another issue which is raised by the text you sent, Sally, is the question of what some people in Australia call ‘correspondence mimicry’ – that is, conscious application of correspondence patterns to create forms which I suppose could be either ‘reversed changes’ or ‘what our language should be if regular changes were followed’. This is quite different from borrowing individual words from conservative or innovating languages. If this were widespread, it would create a problem for the comparative method or at least for the ‘linguistic stratigraphy’ that I like to do, unless these coinages were detectable.<BR>
<BR>
Pat McConvell<BR>
patrick.mcconvell@aiatsis.gov.au</FONT>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>