THEORY: sound change (was RE: Language revival)

John Cowan:
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > Speech communities will sometimes abandon a sound change when it has
> > only been applied to some parts of the lexicon.
>
> And some sound changes are plain unpredictable in their
> application.  In Modern French, why francais, but danois?
> No apparent reason (OF had -ois for both).
Changes in phonetic realization of phonemes are regular. Changes in
phonemic incidence (=which phonemes occur in which words in which order)
are not inherently regular; they can progress word by word, driven
quite possibly by analogy, among other factors.

So the regularity of sound change remains a fact, provided "sound
change" is taken in a restricted meaning of "phonetic change".

If anyone knows of any exceptions to the above claims, I'd be
interested to hear them. I'm not gagging to start a massive
debate on the topic, though.

--And.