Re: COMMENT PLEASE (WAS:Conlang Journal and being a fish)

John Cowan wrote:


>Roger Mills scripsit:
>
>> Theoretically, in historical linguistics, sound change is exceptionless--
>> that is, if X (in this case /t/) undergoes change >Y in environment Z (in
>> this case /o__a/, or more generally, between vowels), then all instances
of
>> X will undergo the change.
>>
>> Thus in the examples given, there is no reason at all why -ota > -oT in
one
>> case, but ultimately > -ora in the other. All things being equal, the
>> sequence -ota has to develop in one way or the other; it can't be both.
>
>Ah, so it's you who doesn't believe in unconditioned phonemic splits
>(and all the time I was attributing this to Mark Line).
Nay, nay, I am not so doctrinaire.  One cannot work in comparative
Austronesian (or any other!)  without learning _LU_ (Lautunstimmigkeit) or
_UA_ (unerklarte Ausnahme)-- Dempwolff's basic reconstruction fairly
bristles with these two.


And I did go on to say: "The concept of exceptionless sound change, in the
Real World of historical linguistics, is somewhat too strong, though it
remains axiomatic.   Things like Jesse's examples do in fact occur, and are
a real bother...."
We just trot out the usual suspects:  dialect mixing; undetected borrowings;
analogy and paradigmatic pressure, or (throwing up hands in frustration)
"unexplained"-- even while admitting it's a cop-out.

>How then do you explain the French split that led to "franc,ais" on
>the one hand, and "danois" on the other?
Or Engl. "great" vs. "meat" (presumably they once had identical
vowels)...There MUST be a reason, somewhere. Oh, the sheer perversity of it
all......

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