rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>
> It is also not impossible for this food which is savored even by bears
>
> let alone humans to be from a very old word that belongs to
> protoworld.
> What is often forgotten is that diffusion processes which give rise to
>
> the GAussian density also have the property that if we divided up the
> density into discrete intervals and tested the number at various
> levels, the highest is always at 0 which would correspond in the
> linguistics case to "no change", in the same way that a drunkard who
> takes steps at
> random into any direction will most often be found where he started.
> There's no law that says that (1) linguistic change is 100% regular
> and (2) that
> if a sound X changes to Y it cannot change back to X again.
 
I am quite sympathetic with Mark Hubey's ambition to expand the use of
quantitative methods in HL, but it won't do to ignore the EMPIRICAL
foundations of the discipline. Mathematical models have to be made to
serve the evidence.  The proposal that given enough time X>Y>X is
plausible is based on a hypothesis that the directionality of sound
change is random. It isn't.  There are clearly preferred (frequently
attested) and disprefered (rarely or not attested) directions for sound
change. The only systematic work on this I know of is in Ch. 5 of
Labov's 1994 "Principles of Language", which only deals with vowels.
But every working historical linguist has probably developed his own
practical database. Off the top of my head I might suggest that lenition
processes (shift of a stop to a homorganic fricative or approximant) are
more common than fortition processes, that shifts to a neighboring point
of articulation are more common than shifts to a distant one, that among
shifts of the latter type shifts from velar to palatal are more common
than shifts from velar to uvular, and that shifts from dental to
alveolar, or alveolar to palatal are more common than shifts from dental
to labial.  Without a substantial body of evidence of actual changes,
and a statistical determination of likely and unlikely paths of change,
we don't even know what types of correspondences to expect in long
distance relationships, or what to look for when trying to discover
them.  The search for identities or 'similarities' may be right, but
could just as well be completely wrong.
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan