Comment on Reality vs Fantasy
hakase@lemmy.zip 17 hours agoGood 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 14 hours 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.
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.
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?