Re: CHAT: Is there a conlang inspired in Old English?

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >
> >En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
> >
> > > Rather than just German and Dutch, you can throw in the entire
> > > Germanic branch - those that don't have 'em, like English and
> > > Icelandic, used to.
> >
> >But they lost them. And since they are both geographically isolated
> >from the area where front rounded vowels appeared and were maintained,
> >it's even a stronger point in favour of an areal feature.
But this isn't really how an areal feature is identified.  There
are many, many features that are statistically either universal,
or so prevalent that one cannot with any certainty distinguish
between a feature that has spread as a result of language contact,
and one that has independently arisen because it is in principle
a feature that is likely to arise in all human languages, where ever
they might be situated.  In this case, front rounded vowels are
quite typologically common, much more so than the peculiarly
Germanic distinction between tense and lax vowels, and moreover
many of these languages are closely related.  The Northern European
area that you are claiming exists in fact represents only a few
languages with front rounded vowels that are *not* Germanic, and
French is the only main example of a language that seems to have
developed them despite the fact that its ancestral language, Latin,
did not have them.  So, all in all, it seems much easier for me
to believe that the few instances of front rounded vowels can
be explained by independently universal motivations (in the case
of France), or by historical inheritance (in the case of Germanic
languages).

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
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