Re: USAGE: Language revival

John Cowan wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
>
> > Because, neurologically, lookup is always more efficient than
> > computation, and there are no known storage space constraints on human
> > memory (your hard drive never "fills up" and it doesn't get harder to
> > recall things as you learn more things), forms will always be recalled
> > from memory rather than computed formulaically, if that is possible.
>
> I said that was contrary to the linguistic evidence before, and I
> say so now.  If it were true, we would have retained "dwerrows" as
> the plural of "dwarf" (Tolkien's example), but we have created the
> analogical plurals "dwarfs" and "dwarves" instead.  If we could
> memorize everything, every language would be a morphological
> nightmare: every noun and verb irregular.
Surely, John, it is only over-familiarity that keeps you from seeing
that human languages generally *are* full of monstrous amounts of
irregularity; if not on the level of words and morphology, on the
level of stock phrases and multi-word constructiosn.

But even so, let me suggest that in many of the world's languages,
English included, there may indeed be enough constraints on language
learning that even if irregularities only affect the learning stage of
language, that is enough for them to occasionally get analogized out
of existence.

Also let me quickly admit that there are other factors involved in
language change, ill-understood ones.  It may be that the same kinds
of forces which cause a community to start raising a vowel here, or
voicing a consonant there, may cause them to regularize an
irregularity here rather than irregularizing a regularity somewhere
else.  To these issues questions about lookup vs. computation have
nothing to say, as far as I can tell.

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                       edheil@postmark.net
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