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Re: OT: Proving the rule (was Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?)

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 7, 2004, 21:19
Joe wrote:
> But it does disprove the rule. It proves that the rule does not hold > for all cases, and is therefore wrong.
I'd always thought (before I learned the etymology, which now appears to be possibly false) that it referred to an exception which, upon further examination, actually turns out to be an example of a special case. For example, in Japanese there is a phenomenon wherein certain words, in compounds, exhibit voicing of the initial segment, e.g., aki "autumn" + tsuki (moon) -> akizuki ([dz] and [z] are in free variation). One of the rules for this phenomenon is that foreign words cannot be voiced. However, there are a small number of exceptions, for example, iroha (an old name for the kana, from the old order which began i ro ha) + karuta (playing card, an early borrowing from Portuguese carta) -> irohagaruta (cards with kana printed on them). It's an exception to the rule, however, upon further examination, it turns out that _karuta_ was simply borrowed so long ago that it's been at least somewhat nativized, thus, it confirms the validity of the rule, altho with a slight modification to "words still perceived as foreign cannot be voiced" -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42