Sound changes versus sound changes

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

[Steve Long:]

>I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable
>resemblances are rare.

In a message dated 6/29/2001 11:53:48 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< It is true that found cognates with little or no phonological similarity
are very common. >>

The difference between "recognizable resemblances" and "phonological
similarities" may make a difference here.  But in any case your examples are
compelling:

<<PU *jïNsi 'bow'
Sami /juoksa/
Hungarian /íj/
Nenets /nginº/

PU *wixti 'five or ten'
Finnish /viisi/ '5'
H. /öt/ '5'
N. /yuq/ '10'...etc.>>

These examples also bring us back to the original topic.

How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did
they take?  (I don't know what dates you feel comfortable with for last unity
of PU.)

Now, <*wixti> to /yuq/ appears to either involve "more" sound changes or
changes that were more radical, in the sense that /yuq/ appears to diverge
more from /wixti/ than /viisi/ does.

If I'm right about that (and I'm not sure I am), then there are two possible
factors that would be at work in evaluating "rate of change."

One is HOW MANY TIMES particular words in a language undergo phonological
change.  There could be a good number of shifts that in the end don't
necessarily travel that far from the original.  Think of first person
singulars in IE, if that's a good example.

The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you
used similar above, in "little or no similarity."  We're not talking about
"unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words
sound significantly different.  In other words, a fricative to a labial
versus a fricative to another fricative.  An ordinary listener might have a
better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former.

So in talking about changes in related languages, maybe we're talking about
two types of change.

One is simply the number of times a language changes.  The other is how fara
language goes with those changes.

<<PU *jïNsi ... Hungarian /íj/.... PU *wixti .... H. /öt/...>>

And these two examples bring up a related matter.   If "every language has
its own phonological system,"  then it might make sense to suggest that every
language has its own path of phonological change.  The amount of
"dissimilarity" might not be a matter of time but also of the quality of the
changes.  A single change may end up being more "dissimilar" than a whole
long series of modest changes.

The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain
changes seem just plain immeasurable.

I saw somewhere a tongue-in-cheek piece where it was predicted that by 2020
the whole French language would be reduced to one single sound - "en" - but
that French would continue to be written as it is now.  The truth behind the
humor captures what some think is the extreme nature of the French
phonological system.  Despite how well the developments that produced French
can be traced and the underlying morphology is IE, the cumulative
phonological system seems worlds apart from for example German.  The
objective contrast between hearing French and hearing German simply does not
suggest a close relationship.  Or perhaps any relationship at all.

If morphology, grammar and syntax are the least likely things to be borrowed
(a la DLW's finite verbs) then perhaps they are the least likely to change,
and therefore are the features that least reflect accurately rates or degrees
of change.  And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is
any reliable measure at all.

You wrote:
<<Larry brought up sound changes in some Pama-Nyungan languages, which, as
far as I understand, have quite effectively eradicated all surface similarity
from most of the cognate words.>>

But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that
appear not to have changed much at all.  In fact, the high convergence
percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount of
commonality between many of those languages.  As I understand it, those who
disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued instead for a
high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan languages.  And that does
not mean that those languages did not change or even change a lot.  It's
rather that as much as they did change, they never change much.

And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of "similarity"
in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change for 3000 years
before attestation.  It may be that they changed often, but through all those
changes they never changed that much.

Regards,
Steve Long