Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:11:44 -0500, Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...> wrote:

>On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:00:03 -0600, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
[...]
>>One thought that might explain the long vowels is that earlier versions
>>of the language had more diphthongs, which simplified to single vowels.
>>Notably, /a i u/ are more common than the other vowels. But any patterns
>>in the data would have to be coincidental at this point, since the
>>Tirelat vowel system wasn't developed with a history in mind. So in a
>>case like this, would it be better to come up with an arbitrary history
>>that doesn't fit all the facts (e.g. proto-language /o/ develops into
>>/@/ except in the vicinity of a bilabial consonant, where it remains
>>/o/, after which other phonetic changes occurred which caused /f/ to
>>merge with /x/ resulting in a phonemic distinction between /x@/ and
>>/xo/)? As it happens, /xo/ is slightly more common than might be
>>expected, but /p@/ and /b@/ do exist, which can't be explained by the
>>hypothetical sound changes.
>
>I'd go for the 'arbitrary' history that plays off whatever distributional
>peculiarities you have, even if it's not a perfect match.  In a natlang the
>synchronic distribution is bound to be a little bit off the diachrony, both
>because of words without an internal history (borrowings but also
>ideophones, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, whatever) and because of
>exceptions to the rules.  And if there's a problem that's too large-scale
>for these sorts of explanations you can invoke dialect mixture and say that
>some words come from a dialect with a given set of changes and other words
>from a dialect without.  This last seems especially appropriate to Tirelat
>if you imagine it to have undergone some imposed standardization, with the
>standardizers picking words from multiple dialects.
Oh, here's another way to get more distinctions than you're entitled to,
since you imagine there was a lot of analogy going on.  What if before the
analogy there was a paradigm in which, to use your example, /@/ and /o/ were
in regular alternation, each appearing in the appropriate
phonologically-conditioned forms, but then analogy generalized the /@/ form
in some words and the /o/ form in others?

Alex