Re: USAGE: Language revival

Ed Heil wrote:

> 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 constructions.
A very palpable hit.

> 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.
Still pretty shaky.  The general pattern of acquisition of irregularities
is "first there is a mountain -- then there is no mountain -- then there is".
In other words, childrens first acquire the irregular "go:went" opposition,
then start to learn the rules and generate "go:goed", which is then
standardized back to "go:went" again, typically under pressure from
peers.

> 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.
The neogrammarian maxim was:

        "Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularity;
        analogy operates irregularly to produce regularity."

--

John Cowan      http://www.reutershealth.com            jcowan@reutershealth.com
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! / Schliess eurer Aug vor heiliger Schau
Den er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
                -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)