Re: Accelerated language evolution : a proposed experiment

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 08:45:22 -0400, Kari Kraus <karimkraus@...> wrote:

>> This would have big implications for 'phonology': the
>> underlying production mechanism would be keyboard input instead of speech,
>> which would make the natural 'phonological systems' and 'sound changes'
>> drastically different than the familiar speech-based ones
>
>
>There is actually considerable overlap between scribal errors and
>speech errors: metathesis, epenthesis, deletion, etc. are known
>phenomenon in the transmission of texts.
That makes sense.  But none of these general types of errors refer to any
systematic relationships between the set of elements in the system (unlike,
say, 'voicing' or 'palatalization' which rely on phonological features).  So
they can exist quite independently of the actual production mechanism, and
I'd expect them to occur in other channels as well, such as sign language
(or, for that matter, evolutionary biology).  I was really just making the
narrow observation that e.g. |p t k| vs. |b d g| would no longer form a
natural system of contrasts (barring phonological interference).

But this got me thinking about typos which have taken on lives of their own,
so to speak.  I can come up with examples of metathesis ('teh', 'pron' (>
'pr0n')) and, well, single replacement ('pwn', 'filk', 'newsfroup') but
can't think of any simple epentheses or deletions.  Can anyone think of any?

>Indeed, there is much
>cognitive evidence suggesting that the model a particular scribe holds
>in memory as he moves from his exemplar to his copy is phonological as
>well as visual.
Sure, if the language of the experiment actually corresponded to some
speakable phonological form.  But I had envisioned that the language might
not be a reasonable orthographic representation of any spoken language.  If
it looked like line noise rather than anything readable, say, I'd expect
much less phonological influence.

Alex

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