Re: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation

Ed Heil wrote:

> But surely it's not true that there is a unidirectional tendency
> towards loss of irregularity?  If that were so, we'd all have
> wondroudly regular languages by now.
There is a countervailing pressure, namely sound change.  Sound
change happens, and we don't know why, but it causes deviations
from otherwise regular patterns.  In proto-English, the plural
of "man" was regularly "manni".  "Manni" became "menni" by the process
called i-umlaut (or just umlaut); when the "i" was lost, we
got "man" : "men", an irregularity that has been maintained by
its frequency for the last 1000 years and shows no signs of
going under.

"Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularity;
analogy operates irregularly to produce regularity."
Hence regularity and irregularity remain in dynamic equilibrium.

> soldiers spread
> Latin all over the empire and a lot of Gauls, Germans, and Dalmatians
> try to talk to each other in it; that sort of thing)
Many Latin irregularities were lost in the Romance languages, but
many others grew: French has hundreds of irregular verbs, whereas
Latin had perhaps a dozen.  The Spanish opposition between
"e" and "ie" in different persons of present tense verbs has no
Latin counterpart; it resulted from varying stress (on the root
or the ending) in Latin.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)