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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Grimm's law for other languages
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Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 14:07:29 GMT
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In article <Pine.A32.3.92.960620000810.82582G-100000@acs2.acs.ucalgary.ca>,
Graham Mezzarobba  <gmezzaro@acs.ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>
>	From my understanding of Grimm's law, the sound changes that
>occurred in Proto-Germanic allow us to follow the language to
>Proto-Indo-European. and the High Germanic Sound shift changes allow us to
>follow the languages to Dutch, Flemish, Friesan, and English.

	These seems misconstrued.  The "High Germanic sound shift"
(what the Germans call the 2. Lautverschiebung or "Second Sound Shift")
is what differentiates High German from the other dialects of West
Germanic (Netherlandic, Frisian, English, Scottish, Low Saxon, etc.).

>	Does this then propose that there is a similar law that will allow
>us to follow Old english to middle english? (I believe so)
>and: Middle english to modern english (I also believe so)

	There is no single law to explain all the sound shifts.  Even
Grimm's Law isn't as powerful as you think it is.  It affects only the
obstruents and doesn't affect them uniformly.  (In fact, another well-
known law, Verner's Law, exists to explain a lot of the "exceptions" to 
Grimm's Law.)

	The most powerful "law" in the history of English is the
Great Vowel Shift, a general restructuring of the vowel system that
marks the transition from Middle English to Early Modern English.
But just as Grimm's law says nothing about the changes in proto-Germanic
vowels, the Great Vowel Shift says next to nothing about changes in con-
sonants.

>	This being the case. there must also be a series of changes that
>can be done to convert Modern english to Friesan and/or Dutch/Flemish.
>there will, of course, be exceptions with certain words borrowed from
>other languages, but the principle for converting the sounds should be
>similar to Grimm's law.

	It's just not that simple.  You can't "convert" Modern English
into Frisian or Netherlandic.  Later changes obscure the environments 
that caused major sound changes in the first place.  A Modern English 
phoneme doesn't have just one source and, therefore, one reflex in re-
lated languages.

>If I am way off base here, please ignore the following instead of flaming
>away....

	I wouldn't flame away at someone who humbly shows an interest
in historical sound change.  I would recommend he read some introductory
works, though.  Most encyclopaedias will have decent articles on Grimm's
Law and the GVS, for instance.

>	This brings to mind a thread regarding the idea of a world
>language. If each language group used a series of these rules for
>changing the phonemes, tracing backwards/across the Proto-Indo-European
>language tree, a somewhat universal language system could be reached..

	All depends on what you mean by a "universal language system."
There are a few linguists out there who think that reconstructing 
"Proto-World" is possible, but they are in the minority.  We don't know
what the exact limits of historical reconstruction are, but we do know
it has them.  If you go back far enough, it's impossible to distinguish
genetic relationship from chance similarity.  Just look at what has
happened to English in the past 500 years.  Indo-European has been around
at least 14 times as long.

>Now, I expect to be way off base, as this seemed too simple to arrive at.
>Any thoughts?

	Linguistics is never as simple as it seems to those outside the
discipline.


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
