Re: Umlaut, Vowel Harmony etc

From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> I think that the regularity of reconstructed protolangs is largely
> an artefact of reconstruction.
Yeah, I agree.

> There might be something to the idea that complicated case systems
> and the like tends to be found in isolated languages.
I doubt that. Latin and Greek had relatively complex case systems,
but they were right there along some of the most frequented trade
routes of antiquity.  Georgian has an even more complicated case
system (distributionally, at least), and has a long history of
contact with the Great Powers of the past: Greece, Rome, Byzantium,
Persia, Russia... the Mongols too, who sacked Tbilisi in 1236.

That, and Georgian has changed less in the 1700 years of its recorded
history than English has in 500.

> The analyticity
> of a language like English is rather creole-like, which might make
> sense for a language that's continuously in close contact with
> other languages.
What? English clitics do all sorts of crazy things.  'Would you'
is [wUdZ@], 'don't you' is [dountS@], 'wasn't' and 'isn't' are
[w@dn=t] and [idn=t] (for my dialect), etc.  The real answer is that
no one knows precisely why some languages make the particular changes
that they do;  there are broadly understood generalizations about sound
and morphosyntactic change, but when you get to particulars it becomes
(or maybe: can become) much harder.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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