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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Language and genes
In-Reply-To: mcv@inter.NL.net's message of Wed, 30 Nov 1994 12:18:40 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonD05uIB.Go4@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
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References: <634@percep.demon.co.uk> <D02y75.K2n@inter.NL.net>
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 01:51:47 GMT
Lines: 48

In article <D02y75.K2n@inter.NL.net> mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
writes:

>In article <634@percep.demon.co.uk>, rmallott <rmallott@percep.demon.co.uk>
>wrote:

>>To say that linguistic changes carried through into the linguistic enviroment
>>in which they occur are random is no more than to deny almost as an axiom the
>>possibility of ever understanding the nature or processes of language
>>change. Randomness cannot be proved.

>What is there to understand?  You can list (in principle) the changes that
>took place in the transformation Latin => Spanish.  But there are no
>"meta-rules" (no interesting ones at least); everything is in the details.

Well, there are historical linguists with a grounding in theoretical phonology
who would disagree with you.  I offer myself as an existence proof.

As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper on Latin vowel reduction, as seen in the
"principal parts" of the Latin verb, based on the synchronic and diachronic
work on vowel systems done by Donegan, and one on the unlikely nature of the
"voiced aspirates" which argued on principles of naturalness for a fricative
interpretation.

I wrote an honours thesis on the single-vowel analysis of Proto-Indo-European
that argued for a surface vs. abstract vowel system similar to those posited
for certain languages of the Northwest Caucasus, in combination with the same
kinds of vowel processes as in my Latin paper.

(Actually, my thesis topic came out of a comment by Pat Donegan:  If PIE only
had one underlying vowel, why wasn't it high, back, unrounded, and nasalized?
That's just as likely as mid-high and front for a single vowel that changes so
much...)

For a number of years I've been looking at the accent system of classical Greek
in comparison with that of modern Japanese and other pitch languages, in an
attempt to better understand the Greek grammarians' descriptions of the accent
system of their language.

In all my work, limited as it has been over the years, I've been as interested
in how Indo-European studies could inform synchronic phonology as in how modern
phonology could explicate Indo-European.  So I would say that the "meta-rules"
are there, and interesting--and highly detailed.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
