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

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Sunday, September 8, 2002, 3:02
> 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). ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637