And all the prescriptivists just collapsed onto their fainting couches.
(I kid, nicely done. Also fuck prescriptivists.)
Comment on Reality vs Fantasy
hakase@lemmy.zip 5 months agoSo much badlinguistics in this subthread.
RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world 5 months ago
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
First, I agree with most of what your saying, but:
This means that the “a”/“an” alternation in Modern English is not to “ease pronunciation” in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), it’s just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.
Why do you frame that as a dichotomy? To ease pronunciation, we take the older form (containing the consonant at the end) when a vowel follows and the reduced form (without the consonant) when a consonant follows. We alternate between these forms to ease pronunciation. Same for “the”: Arguably, the “strong the” is not /þi:/ but /þıj/ ending in a constant (/j/) and is therefore favored when a consonant follows to ease pronunciation. Sometimes it’s used for emphasis which also happens with “an” so it’s basically the same phenomenon.
There are other factors at play, as you pointed out the break to indicate quotation and regional differences. Also the glotal stop might not be consciously perceived but still trigger the same result as any consonant.
I for one use the a/an distinction as I learned it at school while having a glottal stop heavy accent due to my native language so I will say stuff like /ʔən ʔɛpl/ and act surprised when people know where I’m from.
hakase@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Good questions - hopefully the explanation here helps clarify my position.
To ease pronunciation, we take the older form (containing the consonant at the end) when a vowel follows and the reduced form (without the consonant) when a consonant follows.
We don’t, though. This is clear from the fact that “the” occurs in exactly the same phonetic environment (including the lack of stress), with exactly the same vowel, and it doesn’t show the same behavior. This data tells us that there’s no articulatory reason for this alternation. There is no phonotactic constraint active in English that speakers are getting around with this behavior - the process is specific to a single morpheme.
There are tons of other ways we could make this exact same sequence of unstressed schwa followed by another stressed vowel as well, and in exactly none of them do we ever see an “n” inserted to repair the hiatus the way we do with /r/ in many dialects (which one could analyze as an example of “easing pronunciation”, depending on one’s assumptions, though I probably wouldn’t with all of the deserved stigma around the ill-defined idea of “easing pronunciation”). This is telling us that this alternation has nothing to do with “ease of pronunciation”, since speakers clearly don’t need their pronunciation eased in this environment.
As for “strong the” specifically, we see a parallel form in “strong a”, which can also be argued to end with a yod, and which seems to alternate under the same conditions as “strong the” in most dialects, whatever those conditions are. For this reason, I don’t really think “strong the” is very relevant to the discussion.
When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for “ease of articulation” purposes since the change was regular, but post facto explanations for sound change are always a bit dicey.
So, if you want to argue that the original source of the alternation was “ease of pronunciation”, well, sure, maybe, but it’s pretty clear from Modern English data that the “a/an” alternation has nothing to do with ease of articulation at all.
It’s a dichotomy because something either eases pronunciation, or it doesn’t, and in this case, the data makes it clear that it doesn’t. It may feel that way to speakers, but that’s why we rely on tests like the above instead of speaker intuition whenever possible.
How about this: let’s take the f/v morphophonemic alternation in leaf/leaves, knife/knives, etc.
There’s a decent argument to be made that this medial voicing change in Old English was originally to “ease pronunciation”, but once this alternation became morphophonemic, the “ease of articulation” argument falls apart pretty quickly.
For example, I don’t think any serious linguist would assert that it’s ‘life/lives’ in Modern English due to “ease of pronunciation” instead of “historical accident” when ‘fife/fifes’ and countless other later borrowings do not show the same alternation, and the ‘a/an’ alternation is the exact same sort of morphophonemic process.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
You do not seem to be aware of that since your variety also lacks the a/an distinction, but ‘“strong the” before vowel’ is a rule at least promoted by my teachers. So it is the same phenomenon. This is true for other words, too like to (/tə/ vs /tuw/). “a/an” is just the only example visible in writing and your variety doesn’t seem to have these distinctions at all so your excused for not knowing about them. Lindsey has a video, I can look it up later.
since speakers clearly don’t need their pronunciation eased in this environment.
Saying it is possible to pronounce doesn’t mean it can’t be eased (is that wording right? You know what I mean). Language changes isn’t that regular. There are distances I sometimes walk or take the bus to ease the travel. This isn’t that strict. Language change often effects some words, or a single one but not others. For instance “listen” has a silent “t” in most varieties even tho it’s easy to pronounce and speakers didn’t need this shift, it just happened. Examples where this didn’t happen prove nothing.
And your f/v example fails because it’s fossilized. The “e” that softens the f to v went silent but the v stayed voiced and even voiced the s (to z). The a/an distinction on the other hand is productive. It’s “an honor to join a union” since the h in honor is silent and “union” starts with [j]. People even say “an historical event” because the unstressed h is too weak. Even the glottal stop, while not consciously perceived as a consonant, can trigger this. Lindsey also shows this in a video.
When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for “ease of articulation” purposes since the change was regular, but post facto explanations for sound change are always a bit dicey.
So when did it stop ease the articulation? When it fossilized? When it stops being productive? Because, as shown above, it didn’t. It’s still regular. Silent letters don’t effect it, it’s still all about pronunciation, about easing the articulation and only implemented where it does this job. And it always only effected this word so it was never as regular as [f]>[v] between vowels. It always, and still does, effect this one word in a very regular way.
And it’s not an inserted “n”. I think of it as an “a/an alternation” but you can also think of it “an losing its n” just like to (/təw/) loses its w. And this framework also explains why “my/mine” didn’t stay: when /i:/ shifted to /aj/, there was a consonant at the end anymore and the /n/ no longer needed to ease the articulation.
I hope you see why I don’t think your position is very convincing. How can you ignore than simplifying pronunciation is a key factor in language change?
hakase@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Sorry for the late response - yesterday was a crazy day IRL. I think my reply here is too long, so I’ll have to break it into two comments.
You have quite a few serious misconceptions about linguistics concepts in general here, so I’m going to try to go topic by topic to address them, and hopefully by the end the idea will become clearer:
###The Regularity of Sound Change
The first serious misconception is your idea that “sound change isn’t that regular”.
It was discovered in the late 1800s by a German group of young researchers called the Neogrammarians that sound change is in fact completely regular and exceptionless in its environment. This is called the Neogrammarian Hypothesis, or just “The Regularity of Sound Change”, and it’s the foundation for all of historical linguistics (as well as the advance that led to the discovery that synchronic phonology is regular as well - which, by the way, is exactly why sound change is regular). Linguistic reconstruction, and even proving that languages are related to each other, is not possible without the assumption of the regularity of sound change (for reasons I can explain if you’re interested), and data from around the world has borne out the hypothesis again and again.
Note that when looking at historical data, you will undoubtedly find what appear to be exceptions to the regularity of sound change. These exceptions always occurr after the sound change, and are always due to either: 1. Analogical processes or 2. Borrowing/Lexical Innovation.
####Analogy
- Often, a sound change will occur (exceptionlessly, because that’s how sound change works), but sometime later the individual will imagine some sort of resemblance/relationship between one of the words sound change affected and another word or set of words, and will remake that individual word in their mental lexicon to fit the pattern they are perceiving. This is analogy, of which there are many different kinds. The remaking of femelle as female on the pattern of male, for example.
Note, however, that the initial sound change will have been perfectly regular in its environment (because, again, that’s how sound change works), and the later analogical processes have created what only appear to be exceptions to the sound change in question.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that once analogy (or borrowing) begins to create forms that violate the environment for the original sound change, we can conclude that the phonotactic constraint that led to the sound change in question is no longer active in that language’s synchronic phonology. This is the answer to your question: “When did it stop ease the articulation?”)
####Borrowing
- A language will often borrow words from other languages or from other close dialects that show different sound change outcomes (compare the native Latin ruber vs. rufus, both meaning ‘red’, but the latter clearly borrowed from a closely related Italic language that underwent dh > f in this environmtent instead of dh > b - again, regularity). This can also create what looks like exceptions to sound changes, especially in borrowings from dialects closely related to the dialect that underwent the change.
(This is often a better test for when “easing articulation” stops than analogy - if a language can borrow a word or alternation with that pattern, then that pattern must not be disallowed by that language’s phonotactics any longer.)
If a borrowing happens before a sound change, that borrowed word will undergo the sound change just as any other word of the language will, but if the word is borrowed during/after, it will only undergo the change if the phonotactic constraint (the synchronic realization of a sound change) is still active.
####An Example
On to an example. I’m so glad you picked “listen” - it’s perfect for our purposes. This sound change is completely regular, as it turns out; it’s the change that gives us silent "t"s in listen, and soften, and fasten, and whistle, and thistle, pestle, castle, and many others. The environment is easily defined: t > 0 / 'VF_l/n (that is, “t” is deleted after a stressed vowel and a fricative, and before a syllabic (or schwa-supported, if you prefer) n or l, and every single word that fit this pattern at the time this phonotactic constraint was active underwent this change, without exception.
Now, you might very well ask, “What about often? It perfectly fits this environment, but in my dialect (maybe) it’s pronounced with the ‘t’!” What happened here is what’s called “spelling pronunciation”, which is a type of Analogy.
Once the phonotactics of the language have changed (after all of these 't’s have been removed from the language, the phonotactic constraints of the language changed, and these sequences were allowed again (there just weren’t any present for a while - an “accidental gap”). Then, speakers a few generations later began to pronounce “often” specifically with a ‘t’ due to its spelling (likely in a misguided attempt to sound more “correct”), and we now have what appears to be an exception to a perfectly regular sound change, even though it’s not really an exception - the sound change affected ‘often’ just the same, but then another process came along and changed it afterward.
(Note that only “often” is affected by this analogical change - analogy is irregular and unpredictable in its effects, unlike sound change. This is because analogy is a lexical process, while sound change is a grammatical process.)
So, to sum up: Yes, language change is perfectly regular in its environment, and if it looks like it isn’t, then either a) You have the wrong environment b) Analogy has affected the output of the change or c) The apparent exception is a borrowing or later creation of some sort. These are all of the possibilities - there aren’t any others.
Note that what you’ve said here:
Language change often effects some words, or a single one but not others.
is technically correct, but only because you’re conflating sound change and analogy. Sound change is regular, while analogy is not. (Check out Sturtevant’s Paradox for more about this - it’s fun, though it’s a bit orthogonal to our discussion here.)
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I’m not disagreeing with your larger point but I don’t necessarily buy the part of your explanation saying
because in most dialects (at least of American English) “the” before a consonant uses ə while before a vowel sound it’s ē.
hakase@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I don’t think that’s acccurate, but I’d be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasn’t able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didn’t look very long, and there may very well be one).
Also, I’m pretty sure that for the dialects that do use “strong the”, they also use “strong a” in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes that a non-issue.
Either way, there are plenty of other ways to get a word-final unstressed schwa followed by a word-initial stressed vowel, and we never see an “n” repair in any of those other situations either - the important point is that this is a process centered entirely around a single lexical item, and it doesn’t make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be “easing pronunciation”.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
It is well established and the basis of this conversation that in the context in question (bevor a vowel), “an” is used and not “strong a”. I don’t know how you come to this conclusion.
Also check out this amasing video by the one and only Dr Geoff Lindsey about weak forms if you want to educate yourself and of cause the on topic one about the indefinte article that also talks about “strong the”
hakase@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Geoff is fine. I’ve brought up his videos in some sociolinguistics discussions I’ve had recently, but he’s no substitute for peer-reviewed research, and he’s a bit too light on theory to appeal to me casually. Too much of the “what”, too little of the “why”.