rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote:
>
>
> 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
 
This is something that used to bother me a lot and I used to think that
there must be some universality. I am still not sure that there is not
but I am more sure now that some of what we see is not really universal
but rather due to some specific local phenomena.
 
 
> 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.
 
This has to be from a specific time period and a specific set of
languages.
There is a similar problem in probability theory, that of stationarity
of
a signal. It's impossible to prove. No matter how many languages you
look into you can only look at a specific time interval. It's hard to
say
if the sound changes are due to universals or to a particular
combination
of sounds and phonotactics.
 
However, what I wrote above referred, in general, to any two sounds. It
may
be that for some specific X and some specific Y, the sound change X > Y
for some specific language (i.e. specific set of phonemes and
phonotactics)
may be irreversible. But in general I do not see any reason to assume
that
no sound change is reversible given enough time.
 
 
> 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.
 
Right. However, it is strange on the other hand to see those consonant
clusters and lack of vowels in languages like Abaza, Georgian, or
Khoisan
and its clicks. The foremost question is this: if there is such a
universal
trend (say toward lack of cases, or toward voicing, or from stops to
fricatives, or approximants) how then did the language (any language)
get those stops in the first place? Or how did some language get
consonant
clusters at all? HOw did a language get so many cases? Etc Etc.
 
That is the main reason I am not so sure anymore about those alleged
universals, and instead try to explain them as a part of a greater
and long range pattern due to interactions of specific types of
languages.
 
The most important thing to remember in these occurrences is to think
about
phenomena at multiple scales. You can see its workings in physics most
clearly and precisely. We have lots of equations for describing things
at
the sub-atomic level. But most of them are useless for chemistry. At the
same time, we have descriptions of phenomena at the level in which we
treat the material as continuous things (i.e. we call it continuum
mechanics)
and in which we do not even think about the atomic composition of
matter.
It works. Most of what you see around you was designed and created using
the equations of continuum mechanics at best. At the next level up, we
treat
things a lumped objects, and even ignore the continuum aspects. That
works too.
 
The same applies to linguistics changes. There are many scales at which
changes
occur, and if we mix up these levels we create opposing ideas.
 
 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 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
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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