hakase

@hakase@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reality vs Fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reality vs Fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reality vs Fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  So much badlinguistics in this subthread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry, I always leave plenty of room for my animal slurry. ^_^

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Blindly promoting the false dichotomy just like I mentioned, ignoring all of the research on the ways that technology and legislation can reduce the vast majority of the effects mentioned in the data you cite, while also clearly revealing the religious, ideological reasons for ignoring all of that research in the first sentence of your non sequitur screed.

  Just like my crazy aunt in her anti-abortion Facebook rants. But do you have the self-awareness to realize that?

  Nope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. Vegans promote a false dichotomy due to their religious fanaticism, intentionally ignoring all of the ways we can already mitigate many of the problems of meat production with legislation and existing technology.

  They’re basically pro-lifers, promoting an extremist view of which lives people are or are not allowed to end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It’s by mass, not population.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bring them back!!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re very, very good. I reread them for probably the fourth time just last week.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Interesting⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, yeah. Two different things can be true at the same time.