"difference" = difficulty; issues; busghetti

[Charles Doyle]

Ah, yes, the venerable "bead" and the Venerable Horn!

I don't suppose lexicographers would care to list "flutterby" as a VARIANT of "butterfly"--though it obviously IS one.  (And it arouses almost half-a-million Google hits.)

--Charlie
___________________________________________

>>
>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

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