Sound changes versus sound changes

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/20/2001 4:48:10 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

<<...what languages "sound like" is not a linguistic fact of any interest.>>

However, despite the statement above, Prof Trask goes on to prove something
with this fact that is not of any interest:

<<Spanish and French are rather closely related, but they sound very little
like each other.  The Spanish of northern Spain sounds very much like
modern Greek -- a speaker who knows neither can easily confuse these two --
yet Spanish and Greek are only very distantly related.  And Spanish sounds
quite a lot like Basque,... [etc.]>>

The problem here is that Prof Trask seems to be talking about accidental or
non-genetic "sound alikes" which wasn't what the prior posts were about.

My post was about related sound alikes.  (e.g., "How many sound changes
brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did they take?")

So, of course, Prof Trask's examples are irrelevant.

Just to be clear about this.  The French spoken by one French speaker "sounds
like" the French spoken by another French speaker.  They are using the same
or very similar sounds.  This is the most basic situation where words sound
alike.

Presumably, there was a time when the language that would become French more
or less "sounded like" Latin - the presumed ancestor of French.   Presumably,
the sound changes that occurred - between the time when Latin was spoken and
the time the daughter language French was spoken - caused those two languages
to "sound less alike."

Prof Trask also wrote:
<<But P-N languages have still undergone a very significant degree of change.
 Neighboring P-N languages are typically not mutually comprehensible at all.>>

And I'd presume that neither grammar or syntax was the main reason for that
incomprehensibility between previously mutually comprehensible languages or
dialects.  I'd presume that the main reason was a change in sound systems.
Am I incorrect?

Prof Trask also wrote:
<<Similarity in sound systems is not a good metric for degree of divergence.>>

But the sound systems of related languages are precisely how languages
diverge, isn't it?  Don't systematic correspondences show the diverging
changes in what were once unitary sounds in the ancestor?  It would seem that
the difference in sound that separates two related languages is precisely the
degree of divergence.

After all *p > f sounds more divergent than *p > p.  And p sounds less like f
than it sounds like p.  That's a pretty clear degree of divergence.  Isn't it?

Regards,
Steve Long