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Re: THEORY: derivation question

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Thursday, March 25, 1999, 20:34
Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> In an Austronesian language > called Skikun, it seems that all instances of word-final /-p/ have > been changed to /-k/ in the space of two generations.
Interesting phenomenon. Change is often fastest where there is a schism between the younger speakers and the older speakers (presumably due to the fact that a person's language has the greatest changes in early adulthood, and many such changes are abandoned due to the influence of older people). I wonder if this is happening here?
> Rather, a change --- often phonetically abrupt --- starts in a small > number of words, with a small number of speakers, and spreads through > both the population and the lexicon.
Frequently, but not always. There are cases where phonemes are changed almost without exception across the lexicon. For instance, some Spanish dialects change syllable-final /s/ to /h/, this seems to have occurred quickly, without intermediate stages of some words doing that and others not. But, it's true that changes usually diffuse. A great example is the English shifting of the stress of two-syllable nouns. Many two-syllable nouns were originally stressed on the final syllable, for instance, the noun "rebel" was pronounced like the verb "rebel". Then, in three nouns, rebel, outlaw, and something else (I forget what), the stress shifted to the first syllable. So, we now say "a REBel reBELS". This has spread to many other nouns, but not all, so that some people still say "aDRESS", while others say "ADress". AFAIK, everyone says "reVIEW", I don't know of any dialects that pronounce the noun "review" with initial stress. /u/ --> /U/ is another example. Originally, all "oo" were pronounced /u/, thus /buk/, /but/, /sut/, /ruf/. Now, some of those are pronounced with /U/, thus /bUk/, but still /but/. And "roof" varies by dialect between /ruf/ and /rUf/. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor