X>Y>X

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
D. Anthony Tschetter-Breed writes:
 
>Forgive me for being anectdotal, but when topic comes up of sound changes
>from X to Y and back to X, I always think of the English:
>askan > ask > ax (in some dialects, for example Black American English)
 
This example is problematic because OE asc(i)an and acs(i)an have both
continued UNINTERRUPTED into current dialects of English, e.g., there are
still British dialects that have "aks" (it's common in some working class
areas of urban Mersey and Lancashire, for example).  It cannot be assumed
that Black English "reinvented" ask > aks, rather than received it from
relevant British dialects, and has preserved it while most American
dialects have not.  This is NOT a clear case of reversal of a *sound
change* that you want.
 
Meanwhile, it turns out that there indeed have been spontaneous reversals
ask > aks.  For example, many New York City working and lower class
speakers use "aks".  It is clear that the metathesis was spontaneous in
this case, for the following reasons.  In New York City, "short a" (as in
"*a*sk") is RAISED to [E] (a mid to high front tense vowel with some
inglide for its final off-glide).  However, this raising is highly
conditioned.  It occurs in closed syllables before voiceless fricatives,
but NOT before voiceless stops.  Thus, "short a" as in "back, bat, tap,
tax", etc. remains LOW.  The NYC "aks" speakers, however, RAISE "short a"
in "ask", i.e., they pronounce it "Eks", and it contrasts with the low
vowel is "axe".  From this we realise that FIRST,
a > E /_s(k) etc  (as in "past", "task", "bath", "raft", even "bash" etc)
 
and THEN
 
sk > ks / #E_#   (ONLY IN THIS WORD, not, for example, in "task" vs. "tax",
etc.)
 
I gave an example of a real reversed sound change, for what it's worth, in
my last message.  Latin > Romance s > z /V_V and LATER, Central Spanish z >
s (but without intervocalic conditioning).  That was NOT a matter of -s-
surviving from Latin in some dialects of Spanish-to-be and then
rediffusing.  On the contrary, it was a later sound change that happened to
reverse the previous and much older sound change.  No mysterious "invisible
hand" guided Spanish to reverse s > z BACK to s (and indeed the
conditioning is different).  It just happened -- because both directions
are possible (under certain conditions -- certainly NOT ****z > s /V_V).
 
Essentially, such "reverse" changes have no more intrinsic interest than to
serve as a warning that in more time-compressed and less documented cases
that *s = s etc does not necessarily mean that there NEVER were any
intervening stages between a reconstruction and "unchanged" documented
reflex.
 
I don't remember why this issue arose.  Maybe in the context of somebody
wanting to pose borrowing from some language into another language when the
reflex cannot be accounted for in terms of any attested stages of either
donor or recipient languages.
 
P.S.  One comment on one of Hubey's dyspeptic replies to Trask:
 
Larry wrote:
> Mr. Hubey, are you suggesting that one need not spend years studying
> Sumerian in order to know Sumerian?
 
Mark replied:
>In order to produce a list of cognates all you need is a dictionary.
 
Unh Unh.  Wrong!  As Larry implied in his message about wrong morpheme
cuts, you also need a GRAMMAR (which dictionaries usually don't supply, at
least not in sufficient detail).  Dictionaries do not generally analyse
WORDS into MORPHEMES, esp if the morphemes are derivational affixes of
varying degrees of obscurity.  Amateurs (and even some professionals)
produce a lot of crap by using dictionaries (of languages whose grammars
they are ignorant of), and arbitrarily inserting morpheme boundaries to fit
preconceived cognates into procrustean molds by getting rid of the "bad"
stuff.  Such practices conceitedly ape the more judicious use of the
technique by more RESPONSIBLE linguists, who nevertheless sometimes make
mistakes with that reconstructive technique.  At least when responsible
linguists indulge in the technique (responsible amateurs included) they
continue to take seriously the issue of the historical significance of the
stuff they snipped off.