Re: irregularities

Quoting David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

>     So, if "sky" already takes the dual, why not have all natural nouns
> take the dual?  That'd be interesting.
Because presumably not all natural nouns have northern and
southern extensions, which was the stated reason for the
idiom.  It needs to make sense withint the context of the
culture in which it develops.

>     Also, there's the happy maxim: "Sound change is regular and
> produces irregularity; analogy is irregular and produces regularity."
One that is, unfortunately, misleading.  Soundchange does
sometimes regularly alter the phonology to produce "irregularities"
in the morphology, but not always.  Sometimes regular phonological
changes result in the collapse of semantic distinctions. And
analogy can produce irregularity too:  the past tense of the
English verb _dive_ was originaly _dived_ in all English dialects.
In America, however, probably due to analogy with _drive_, the
past tense became _dove_ for some speakers.  The same goes for
"sneak, sneaked/snuck" from "stick, stuck", I think.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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