intervocalic devoicing

[bwald]

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Alan King's most recent message includes the following statement:
 
>There is the "see-sea-say" factor: owing
to "shifting undercurrents", a language can perform apparent about-turns,
even in violation of historical linguistic "laws".
 
I think the reference is to the same thing usually exemplified with "meet -
meat - mate".  It is indeed an interesting historical problem, but not one
to be treated as casually as the above statement does.  The "mystery",
well-known in the history of English, is that in Early Modern English,
during the Great Vowel Shift, there was a point at which orthoepists and
the like reported a merger of "meat" and "mate", more generally, for
earlier /E:/ and /ey/, as "meet", and more generally /e:/ rose to /i:/
position.  Later, however, /E:/ rose to /i:/ and merged with previous /e:/.
A small residue of the apparent more general merger remains in the words,
"great", "steak", "break" and a few others (like "drain" < "drean") and
many words before "r" in closed syllables, e.g., "tear" (the verb), "wear",
"bear", etc.  (contr. "spear", "tear" the noun, etc.)
 
There have been many attempts to solve the problem.  Halle is (in)famous
for suggesting that the merger took place on the phonetic level but that
the earlier *phonemes* remained distinct.  He did not produce
morphophonemic alternations for the "ea" words that presumably detached
themselves from /e:/ (or /ey/) and rose to /i:/, leaving mysterious and
mystical the support for the maintenance of an underlying (morpho)phonemic
distinction in face of the phonetic merger.
 
A more traditional attempt at solution is to hem and haw about "dialect
mixture" (esp in London), such that there were "meet" vs. "meat/mate"
merger dialects (earlier prestigious) in contact with "meet/meat" merger
vs. "mate" dialects.  Somehow the latter dialects replaced the former (in
the relevant area) but the "exceptional" words I mentioned above from the
former dialects survived the replacement process (as if constituting a
substratum).  Though complicated, this solution is not totally
unreasonable, and was obviously aimed at defending the notion of the
regularity of sound change at the expense of seeking any control over
lexical borrowing across dialects.
 
More recent theories, aimed at greater reconciliation of the two
traditional approaches, involve lexical diffusion of sound change.  This
does not really require two dialects in contact but a gradual diffusion of
a sound change through the lexicon.  A variant could propose (I don't know
if anyone has made this proposal in print) something like:  a lot of "ear"
words and the other exceptions were the first to rise from /E:/ to /e:/ and
somehow they merged with /ey/.  However, as the process of /E:/ > /e:/
continued they did NOT merge with /ey/ but /e:/ caught up with the "ee"
words either at or on their way to /i:/.
 
More radical, and, unsurprisingly, my preferred solution, is the one of
"near-merger" (Labov).  According to this theory, /e:/ and /ey/ did not
merge as reported, but remained distinct along a dimension of "tenseness"
("frontedness") that the orthoepists did not recognise (even though they
themselves may have unconsciously made the distinction).  So, the fronter
(tenser) /e:/ remained distinct from the front (but less front, laxer) /ey/
and continued to rise to /i:/, to merge with the "ee" words.  There was
phonetic conditioning holding back many of the "ea" words before
same-syllable /r/, and they indeed did merge with "-are" and "-air".  A
similar laxing effect is still operant for most vowel before (consonantal)
-r in current dialects.  Similarly, pre-vocalic r (as in great, break,
drean = drain) and post-vocalic k (as in steak, break) retarded further
raising (although "creak", "streak" etc), a statement about "mini" phonetic
conditioning effects during the variable stage of a sound change.
 
None of the above solutions are totally satisfying or above criticism (and
further research for testing), but I don't think one should throw up one's
hands and cavalierly talk about
"apparent about-turns, even in violation of historical linguistic "laws".
Instead, I think one should
recognise the challenge to investigate the matter further.   It is the next
frontier to be crossed in understanding the nature of sound change, and
indeed the nature of linguistic "laws".  (I guess "laws" has a
double-meaning, first, man-made/artificial and ultimately fallable attempts
to explain/account for a phenomenon, which I take to be the point of Alan's
scare quotes, and, second, the actual principles governing linguistic
behavior and change, which I take to be the purpose of linguistic research
and the way linguists channel and DISCIPLINE their curiosity about the
facts of language.)