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Flying Chaucers (Linguistics)
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Donmillion wrote:
[1] "A, E, G, H, I, J, L, N, O, Q, R, U, V, W, Y, Z and M" are not vowels; they are letters of the alphabet, whereas vowels are speech-sounds. Some of the letters are used to represent vowel sounds, but not all of them. This is a matter of definition.


There's the thread. Now pull on it.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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I'm still waiting for an explanation of how the spelling of [naif] as KNIFE came about.

And I'm waiting for direct evidence of the GVS.

Sometimes it's hard to get a word in edgeways: even if I shift the vowels. I'll get to KNIFE eventually.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Don, you wondered what my request for concreteness involved when itemising the errors in THOBR's language table. You then proceed, on every occasion, to complain because I have not used the correct term (writing for a non-lijnguist audience I would obviously use the descriptive term rather than the jargonic one) rising to this (which I think must be an all-time Donnish classic):

Linguists would not describe English as descended from Anglo-Saxon but from Old English. The reason is simple: in all their surviving writings, the "Anglo-Saxons" never used the term "Anglos-Saxon";

Got that, everybody?
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Dan Crisp wrote:
I'm still waiting for an explanation of how the spelling of [naif] as KNIFE came about.

And I'm waiting for direct evidence of the GVS.

Sometimes it's hard to get a word in edgeways: even if I shift the vowels. I'll get to KNIFE eventually.


I do sympathise with the last point ...

What would you consider "direct evidence"?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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What would you consider "direct evidence"?

Some of the thousands of things you said they said about what they were hearing at the time.
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DPCrisp


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I'm still waiting for an explanation of how the spelling of [naif] as KNIFE came about.

And I'm waiting for direct evidence of the GVS.

I did miss that Don's was a response to my "I'm still waiting to hear what people had to say about it at the time." -- wasn't trying to start a tedious game of ping-pong.

But you did seem to ignore the fundamental matter quoted with it, Don:
    If you can not determine with any precision how things were pronounced before the shift -- and, barring RP, you can not determine with precision how they are pronounced after the shift -- then you can not determine what the shift was.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Mick Harper wrote:
Don, you wondered what my request for concreteness involved when itemising the errors in THOBR's language table. You then proceed, on every occasion, to complain because I have not used the correct term (writing for a non-lijnguist audience I would obviously use the descriptive term rather than the jargonic one)

But what you did thereby was to falsify the case you claimed to be combatting. And unnecessarily, I think. If your "non-linguist audience" could cope with proto-Western European, proto-Germanic and proto-Romance, could they not also cope with "proto-Romance" in its proper place (according to the philologists' model), and with proto-Indo-European? Or with German shown as a co-descendant of "proto-Germanic" and a sister-language of English, rather than as a parent of English? I don't see why that would be so difficult.

BTW (nobody's fault, one of those things), I think this part of the discussion would have been more appropriate in Matters Arising (where I did attempt to raise it). But there you go ...
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Mick Harper
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So at least we are agreed that your original statement

I'm reminded again of the "language family" diagram on page 177 of THOBR, which "orthodoxy holds" to be true, according to Mick. Sadly, any linguist would laugh at the hopeless inaccuracies in the diagram, which bears no real resemblance to "orthodox" reconstructions.

is quite untrue and that it actually resenbles it completely (except for terminology). Don, why dost thou waste thy time on such trivialities? [Thinks: Why do I?]
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Mick Harper wrote:
So at least we are agreed that your original statement

I'm reminded again of the "language family" diagram on page 177 of THOBR, which "orthodoxy holds" to be true, according to Mick. Sadly, any linguist would laugh at the hopeless inaccuracies in the diagram, which bears no real resemblance to "orthodox" reconstructions.

is quite untrue and that it actually resenbles it completely (except for terminology).

You think so?

Here's an alternative family tree, which reproduces some of the features of the THOBR example, except for its being a different family:

Fred Smith --> Prince Charles --> Queen Elizabeth
………...\
…………\ --> Princess Margaret

I think you'll agree (but I wouldn't) that it's essentially accurate (except for terminology). To make it even more "accurate" (i.e., to resemble the THOBR example more completely), I'd need another sister of Princess Margaret that I could include as her daughter.

Don, why dost thou waste thy time on such trivialities?

The detail is where hypotheses stand or fall (it's where the Devil lives).

And you did ask ...
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Hardly.

Because in the case of THOBR, the details don't matter. What is crucial is the claim that the tree works as well and perhaps better when stood upon its head. Substitute the accurate terminology and tip the tree. There ya go. I knew you could do it.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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DPCrisp wrote:
What would you consider "direct evidence"?

Some of the thousands of things you said they said about what they were hearing at the time.

Not quite what I said, but I can't be bothered to look back for the actual wording. Whatever I wrote, what it meant was that the case for the GVS is built in part on the interlocking evidence of thousands of manuscripts from the late Middle English and early New English periods; and the authors of some of those manuscripts attempted to record the pronunciations of contemporaries who spoke differently from themselves.

(An example is the Welsh transliteration of an English poem that I presented earlier, which you (I think) disparaged as evidence. I'll try to come back to your points on that shortly.)

I may not easily be able to satisfy your request in the short term, so I'll have to ask for patience. Meanwhile, could you explain for me where and how you have seen "G, H, J, L, N, Q, R, V, W, Y, Z and ... M acting as vowels"?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Personally. I've never seen the point of trying to convince people of anything. That's why I remain opposed to public discussion. It wastes valuable time on people who have nothing productive to do with their own.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Some of the thousands of things you said they said about what they were hearing at the time.

Not quite what I said, but I can't be bothered to look back for the actual wording. Whatever I wrote, what it meant was that the case for the GVS is built in part on the interlocking evidence of thousands of manuscripts from the late Middle English and early New English periods; and the authors of some of those manuscripts attempted to record the pronunciations of contemporaries who spoke differently from themselves.


    "the evidence--which, for the GVS, includes what people wrote at the time (15th century onwards) about what they were hearing at the time."

    "the facts--such as the implications of rhymed poetry, or the descriptions of English pronunciation in the writings of foreigners, not just the Welsh--or even as I've just suggested, what the English themselves wrote about their own language?"

    "I can see that [Orthodoxy] has explanations for how and when the pronunciation changes took place, supported by thousands of contemporary quotations"
OK, I feel a bit like we were led on, but is there still any prospect of seeing
  • what people wrote about their own language/what they were hearing at the time;
  • foreigners' descriptions of English pronunciation;
  • the implications of rhymed poetry;
  • and especially -- since you told us we were not to expect internal evidence in (changes in) the way things were written -- how pronunciation changes are supported by thousands of contemporary examples?
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DPCrisp


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What's AE's alternative hypothesis for that huge eccentricity known as English spelling?... The alternate hypothesis upheld by "orthodoxy" is that English spelling reflects significant changes in the way words are pronounced, that occurred (and are continuing to occur) since the spelling conventions were set.

There were lots of ways we could have spelled things. In Middle English, they did. They all made sense, but variation is burdensome when the number of players is large. Some were standardised upon. They were not further rationalised, so we still have a handful of ways to write the same thing.

What do you disagree with so far?

You can only choose one spelling as the standard for each word. No matter how well it represented the exact pronunciation** of... whomever... it could not possibly represent all the pronunciations in all English accents. It represented the word: we don't use writing to represent pronunciation*

* Except in specialist circumstances, such as in plays, where we will probably use non-standard spellings to represent an accent. And how do we do that? By using some 'phonetic' conventions readers will probably understand, though a) we could still have used others and b) we can not guarantee the reader will get it, since the spelling alone can not be precise enough. Not even a pronunciation guide can be used on its own.

** Except of course, if X is not standardised, there is no such thing as accurately representing anything by X.

If, quite apart from the problems of individual letters and sounds, standardised or otherwise, written English did not represent English speech before the shift/standardisation and does not represent English speech after the shift/standardisation, how can we hold that significant changes in speech are connoted by the changes in spelling?

I was struggling with the GVS before, when I thought it was all about changes in spelling. But it's not even that, apparently. There were changes in spelling -- or, more to the point, the variations in spelling died down as they became fixed -- at the very time, but they are to be ignored...?
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DPCrisp


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Spellings were standardised from the 15th century or so, but when were the conventions invented? Since Chaucer, for instance, combines familiar with unfamiliar spellings, let us say our spellings were invented throughout the Middle English period. Some that became standards might have been brand new, others went back centuries already.

At some point, h-i-s was fixed. Does that mean everyone said "his" at that time? If so, was there a shift from hys, recorded earlier? Was that itself shifted from the his recorded earlier still?

Or were his and hys contemporary options, one of which was selected? What can we tell about the qualities of the sounds, if two alternatives were equally "accurate"? I and Y could be the same, could be different. Some accents lean towards U or E in his, more towards S or to Z...

If hys had not survived on record, could we say no one had ever differed or varied in their pronunciation of his?
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