Re: [T] -> [f] (was: Chinese Dialect Question)

On Saturday, October 4, 2003, at 12:59 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 07:22:24AM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
>> Quite why Mark can't imagine the falling together of /f/ and /T/ to just
>> [f] (and /v/ and /D/ to /v/), I don't know.
>
> I can *imagine* it easily enough - I just wasn't aware of it. :)
I stand corrected.  I checked and you said you had trouble imaging it,
not that you couldn't.  Different thing.

> And I've been conditioned through my elite-speaker prescriptivist
> education to regard it as an error committed by the ignorant. :)
I guess many of us were so conditioned and certainly in my generation
(I'm in my 60s) it did bear that stigma; but, at least here, there has been
a greater acceptance of regional 'accents' in the past half-century and
and education has been a little less prescriptivist in such matters.  The
phenomenon is so widespread in certain regions; although generally
people would agree that the 'proper' or "posh" pronunciation is [T] and
[D], [f] and [v] for /T/ and /D/ does not carry the same stigma as it once
did, particularly among the younger generations (say 40 and below).

>> The change also occurred in pre-Latin
>
> Oh, sure, but that's a historical change.  Seeing it happening
> "in real time" in one's own language is different.
How so?  Doesn't the fact that it can be seen to be happening
confirm what was suspected about the situation in the past?
Doesn't one give greater credence to the other?

Ray
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