Re: CHAT: R: CHAT: uGLy KaPiTaL LeTTRes & Klingon (was Luca's Re: Ke'kh)

> Date:         Sun, 24 Sep 2000 13:05:01 GMT
> From:         Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>
> But as many and varried as the dialects of english are, and as long ago as
> some of the British dialects must have diverged from each other I suspect
> you'd end up "reconstructing" an English from before the Great Vowel Shift,
> which would probably mean that no one would even recognize it as English
> except scholars of Middle English!    It would probably be easier to just
> have us all speak Latin. *g*
That's not how language change and reconstruction works. Unless you
have totally isolated dialects, some changes will propagate from one
to the other, even while other differences accumulate.

As far as I know, all now surviving dialects of English did eventually
participate in the GVS. Thus the reconstruction will have the shifted
values, even though some other reconstructed features may correspond
to stages before the shift.

Cf. the reconstruction of Proto-Romance that some linguist did as an
experiment a few(?) years ago. It came out looking a lot like what we
know about Vulgar Latin, but with some obviously 'wrong' features too.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)