Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

Adam Parrish skrev:
 > On Jan 19, 2007, at 6:19 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
 >> This makes a reconstructed protolanguage a rather special
 >> thing, and different from the actual prehistoric
 >> language(s) that once existed in that you can only
 >> reconstruct the regularities and those parts of structure
 >> which survive -- or leave a mark, the technical term is
 >> "leave a reflex" or "be reflected" -- in the descendant
 >> languages. Any irregularities and anything which analogy,
 >> phonetic loss ('merger with zero'), syntactic and
 >> morphotactic change [...] has done away with cannot be
 >> reconstructed, so a protolanguage ( '*asterisk language'
 >> ) is only a subset of the actual prehistoric language.
 >
 > This is a very interesting point. I don't think I've ever
 > heard it explicitly formulated in this way. Thanks!

Thanks for the prize! I must have read it stated somewhere,
or parts of it in different places. I suspect I got the core
of it from Roger Lass.

I might add / revise that complete mergers, whether with
zero or something else, aren't recoverable. E.g. there is no
way to tell that Old Swedish had a /T/, since its allophones
have merged completely with /t/ or /d/, (in the dialects
also with zero, where it was intervocalic or word-final.)

I must say I'm impressed that my rather convoluted syntax
was parseable. I don't know why it gets that way! :-)
Probably my thought processes are convoluted. They surely go
down side tracks all the time, which is why I get precious
little finished...--

/BP 8^)
--
   B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Truth, Sir, is a cow which will give [skeptics] no more milk,
and so they are gone to milk the bull."
                                     -- Sam. Johnson (no rel. ;)

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