Re: evolving languages

Joe wrote:


>On Wednesday 15 January 2003 9:41 pm, Arthaey Angosii wrote:
>> Emaelivpar Christophe Grandsire:
>> >Unless they are frequently used (which is why most irregular words are
>> > common ones, too bad for the L2 learner of the language ;))) ).
>>
>> From my knowledge of English, Spanish, and (teensy amounts of) German, I
>> agree that this is what I've experienced.  By why is this so?  If I know
>> the theoretical reasons behind irregularity, perhaps I can do a better
job
>> of working it into Asha'ille.  :)
>>
>
>I think it's a tendency to say commoner words faster, which means that
>phonetically they lose phonemes, mutate, and soforth, creating irregular
>forms...
That's a factor, but more irregularities arise from phonological processes
that have ceased to be active in the language.  Consider:

Latin.  video, videre 'to see' (present stem vid-e-)
   Perfect vidi (ult. < *vid-i  )
   Participle:  visus (< *vid-tus where /d-t/ > *t-t or maybe **t-s > s by
assim. )
     (or was it vistus? memory fails.)

With more (mostly regular) sound changes, this ends up in Span. as veo/ver,
ví, visto

Latin. pono, ponere 'to place' (pres., *pos-n-, inherited n-infixation from
IE, irreg.? deletion of the s)
  Perfect posui (stem pos- + one of several possible perf. formants)
  Part.  positus (stem pos- i(stem vowel) -tus)

Ending up in Spanish as pongo/poner, puse, puesto (only the -g- in pongo is
hard to explain, though it crops up in other verbs as well, vengo, tengo,
salgo etc.)

There was apparently a whole class (1 of 9 IIRC) of IE verbs that
infixed -n-, like
Sanskrit:  root /ruc/, Present rinokti /r-in-a-uc-ti/ (IE *leuk-); the class
survived into Latin as a bunch of irregulars like
tango/tangere/tetigi/tactus 'touch'.  And also in Germanic, consider Engl.
think - thought, bring - brought

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