linguistic maxims [was Re: pre-IE k > H]

[Carol F. Justus]

>On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Carol Justus (cjustus at mail.utexas.edu) wrote in passing:

>> Some years ago, Yakov Malkiel, exhaustively studying the details of the
>> Romance languages, took a position often reduced to the slogan "every word
>> has its own history" because he found so many explanations for exceptions to
>> regular sound correspondences.

>Doesn't this particular maxim date back to Hermann Paul and the beginnings of
>dialect geography--on which Schmidt based his proposal of the _Wellentheorie_?

>                                                                Rich Alderson

Quite right. This has a long tradition, but Malkiel did a particularly
thorough job of examining the details for the Romance languages, including
stages that are still spoken and earlier stages with textual histories. One
does cannot always extend the experience of one language to another, of
course.