Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!alderson
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 23:07:00 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonD05v91.I90@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <634@percep.demon.co.uk> <D02y75.K2n@inter.NL.net>
	<3bihbv$40t@amy13.Stanford.EDU> <D03s7q.Cwv@inter.NL.net>
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 02:07:48 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <D03s7q.Cwv@inter.NL.net> mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
writes:

>Agreed by whom?  I think that sound change, both synchronically and
>diachronically, is not gradual at all.  As one goes from one dialect
>area to another, phonological systems change abruptly (isoglosses).

Ontongeny does not necessarily recapitulate phylogeny here:  The point at which
most sound changes can be said to be complete is generally more than three
generations long.

>The "Great English Vowel Shift" is a diachronical example of abrupt
>system change...  I think it's futile to look for `causes' of the
>Vowel Shift: there aren't any. Not in the social sphere, much less in
>the biological/genetic sphere.

What makes you think it was abrupt?  There is evidence that a long chain of
rather small changes over the course of about 300 years resulted in the GEVS.
I believe that Donegan wrote a paper published in the Ohio State Working Papers
in Linguistics (probably listed under P. D. Miller) around 1974, as part of her
work on processes which affect vowels, on this very question.
-- 
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_
