'Reversed change' dialect borrowing

[Brian Joseph]

Greetings -- this discussion is most interesting, and I
would like to add just a few observations; even if they are
not directly on target, I think this is an appropriate
forum to mention them and they are in any case provoked
by the recent postings.

First, even though no one has actually said this, so in a
sense I am either responding to a straw man or preaching to
the choir, let me note that this discussion shows why it is
useful to be precise about what we mean by "sound change". 
In the cases brought out here, the event that was reversed was
a Neogrammarian-style (i.e. regular and phonetically driven)
sound change, what I like to call "sound change proper" or
"sound change in the strict sense" (or even simply "Neogrammarian
sound change") whereas the reversing event is a socially-driven
change.  Terminology is always tricky to be sure, but I would 
love it if the term "sound change" were restricted to "sound
change proper" and some other term were invented for "changes in
sounds that are not sound change (in the strict sense)".  I often
tell my classes that as paradoxically as it might seem, not every
change in the sounds of a word is a matter of sound change (analogical
change, clippings, tabu deformation, and so on are all the sorts of
"other events" that can lead to changes in the pronunciation of a
word that are not Neogrammarian sound change in the strict sense).

Second, socially-driven events of change *can* show regularity (though
they need not), but typically lack the phonetic basis that is a hallmark
of Neogrammarian sound change.  We see this sort of thing in hypercorrection 
all the time (Peter's.

Finally, it reminds me of what I said at my ICHL presentation this past
summer, namely that when we get right down to it, social factors can 
trump everything else in change (or everything except for the most basic
immutable universal foundational aspects of language, to the extent there
are any and if there are to the extent we can identify them).

--Brian

Brian D. Joseph
The Ohio State University


> About Peter's comment:
> 
> Well...I actually think we need to consider
> carefully whether we "agree that it's not exactly typical 
> of what usually goes on".  One thing that has struck
> me again and again over the past ten years or so, ever
> since I got interested in this whole issue of
> deliberate change, is that we merely *assume* that
> most changes are non-deliberate throughout their
> history.  We have very little evidence on this point.
> I first heard about people making their dialects
> more different from the dialect of the guys next door
> when I read Peter's Dialects in Contact.  But ever
> since I started giving talks here & there on deliberate
> change, people have come up with new examples for me;
> one such example was a case of deliberate dialect 
> divergence from Peru -- the people told the 
> fieldworker that they wanted to make sure they 
> retained their differentness from the people just
> around the mountain from them, and so they deliberately
> distorted the pronunciation of their own words in
> a rule-governed way.
> 
> I do still believe that most linguistic change must
> be non-deliberate.  That's the easiest way to account
> for (for instance) regular sound change.  But I
> also think that claims that the vast majority of
> linguistic change is subconscious are on shaky
> ground, as long as they lack evidence of any kind.
> (I admit that I haven't the faintest idea how one
> might go about gathering evidence.)
> 
>   -- Sally Thomason
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