Re: Historical Lingusitics/Dialect Question

Hello,

Wesley Parish:
> As far as I can work it out, grammatical change follows
> phonological change,
> because the phonemes tend to collide, eg:
>
> Latin ending -us loses -s, -um loses -m, degrades to -o
Well, this is true, to an extent, but language change can depend on an
interplay of factors.

Take German - the repertoire of phonemes it has in inflections is quite
small due to vowel reduction and other processes, and yet it retains a
vigorous system of cases, plus other niceties like weak / strong
ajdectival declensions &c. Swedish, on the other hand, has relatively
little reduction, but it has simplified the grammar to about the same
extent as the neighbouring Danish and Norwegian, which have suffered
much reduction (Sw. dagar, kvinnor, rader vs. Nor. dager, kvinner,
rader)

Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

Nid byd, byd heb wybodaeth
                 --Welsh saying