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Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

From:Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...>
Date:Monday, January 15, 2007, 4:19
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