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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Archaic English [was: Re: Anounsing a nu Ingglish spelling
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Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 21:50:57 GMT
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In article <32CFF0C3.3AEB@online.no>, Anders Blehr  <ablehr@online.no> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>
>> [...] If you went by orthography alone, you would consider English
>> and Greek two of the most conservative languages in Europe and Irish and
>> Finnish two of the most innovative.
>
>Finnish?  I have to admit that I don't know very much about Finnish, but
>what I do know is that Germanic loan words that entered Finnish some two
>thousand years ago are still almost Proto-Germanic in appearance: F.
>"kuningas" (king), PG. "*kuningaz"; F. "kernas" (willingly), PG.
>"*gernas"; F. "sakko" (fine, n.), PG. "*sko".  This seems to suggest
>that Finnish practically hasn't changed over the past two millennia. 
>But then again, maybe the spelling has changed dramatically, I wouldn't
>know (although I can't see why it should if the spoken language didn't
>change a lot).

	Finnish has only had a standard orthography for less than a
century.  Like most recently-designed orthographies, it is almost
prefectly phonemic, e.g. there are no silent letters.  Previously, such
fragments of written Finnish as one came across were usually written in a
Swedish-based orthography--hardly the best system for writing Swedish, let
alone a language with as a different a phonology as Finnish.  If you
naively compared examples of the earlier (pseudo-Swedish) orthography to
examples from the modern (phonemic) one, you might well conclude that the
language had changed a lot more than it actually had.  (As you point out,
it's breathtakingly conservative in some aspects, especially phonology.)

>> >> [Daniel von Brighoff:]
>> >> 
>> >> ... [au] is actually spelled <acute-accent a>, and so forth.
>
>[...]
>
>> I never said /au/ is spelled "a" ...
>
>The only differences I see between your "[au] is actually spelled..."
>and "I never said /au/ is spelled..." statements is that the accute
>accent is missing in the latter and that you use [] and I // to
>represent pronunciation.  Hopefully my accents don't fall off somewhere
>between here and where you are (with: ; without: a)...

	The difference between /au/ and [au] is of no small significance
in linguistic usage.  [au] represents a particular speech sound (actually,
a range of speech sounds because my phonetic transcriptions tend to be
broad) which is approximately that of Eng. 'how' (in my dialect).  A level
of abstraction divides this from /au/, which is either a single phoneme or
a sequence of two phonemes (depending on the particularly analysis).  It
may have a variety of phonetic outcomes depending on dialect, register,
rate of speech, etc.  For example, in much of Canadian English, the first
vowel is centralised before a voiceless sound (a change known as "Canadian
raising"); in phonetic transcription, this would be written [@u].  In some
English dialects, /au/ is always [@u]; in others, it never is.  In
Surselvan (a variety of Romontsch), unstressed /au/ may be [u] or [@],
depending on its etymological origins.  And so on.

>> [Anders Blehr:]
>> 
>> >[...] Furthermore, it's not /au/ that's being spelt "", it's
>> >"" that's being pronounced /au/ (and "au" //).
>> 
>> ... if <acute-accent a> is pronounced [au], then the reverse
>> is true--that [au] is spelled <acute-accent a>.  Just as it's true that if
>> English <ow> is pronounced [au], then it's true that [au] is spelt <ow>.
>> (Although it does not follow from this that <ow> is *always* pronounced
>> [au] or that [au] is always spelled <ow>.)
>
>It's the "chicken and egg" thing again.  I thought you said that the
>Icelanders had chosen to use the letter "" to represent the /au/
>diphtong, when it's the other way around: "", which originally
>represented a long /a/, now represents /au/, because that's what the
>long /a/ changed into.  Obviously I was mistaken.

	Regardless of what <acute-accent a> [I can see 'em, I just can't
write 'em] once represented in Icelandic, the Icelanders are now choosing
to let it represent [au].  This is as much a choice as Middle English
scribes deciding to write [au]/[@u] as <ou> and not <u> or modern Germans
writing [au] <au> and not <ou>.  As I see it, the only difference between
what I said and your attempted restatement (it wasn't a true restatement
because you changed the punctuation) was one of emphasis.  Emphasis does
not necessarily recapitulate evolution.

>> That said, thanks for the capsule lesson in Norse vocalism.
>
>Well, to be honest, I'm quite impressed with the way you seem to be able
>to argue nitty gritty details pertaining to almost any language. 
>However, I read a few sentences you posted in German a while back, and
>they had a few errors in them, so that easened my envy somehow... ;-)

	My model is Eric Hamp, the eminent linguist at the University of
Chicago (jokingly described as "the only living native speaker of
Proto-Indo-European").  One of his colleagues told me that he'll produce a
correct utterance in any language you want provided you're willing to wait
long enough for it.  Since I don't want to keep y'all waiting that long, I
make more mistakes...	

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