Specifically, the process by which cucaracha became cockroach is called folk etymology, whereby words that people have trouble making sense of in their native language can be remade with pieces they are familiar with.
Other examples of folk etymology include Key West from Spanish Cayo Hueso (Bone Key), crayfish from French creviche, Alzheimerās Disease being called Old Timerās Disease, and many, many others.
Turns out we were living on the Bionis after all
I tried out a couple of other Reddit replacements a few years ago before Lemmy took off, and I really enjoyed the few that had separate votes for āfunnyā and āinsightful/contributes to discussion/whatevā.
Yeah it made voting a bit clunkier, but it did a good job of differentiating between two very different ways of positively contributing to a discussion.
Geoff is fine. Iāve brought up his videos in some sociolinguistics discussions Iāve had recently, but heās no substitute for peer-reviewed research, and heās a bit too light on theory to appeal to me casually. Too much of the āwhatā, too little of the āwhyā.
you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic?
Yes, I agree with this statement, and Iāve already answered this question, but here it is again:
It stopped easing pronunciation as soon as the phonotactic constraints of the language changed to once more allow the sequence that was previously disallowed.
Thatās the answer.
And, once again, we can test for when this happens by looking for apparent exceptions to the sound rule in question (introduced later by borrowing, analogy, or subsequent regular sound change).
Once apparent exceptions appear, that indicates to us that the phonotactic constraints have changed, and that the sequence is once again being allowed in the language. At that point āeasing pronunciationā no longer makes sense as a descriptor of the alternation (as in the case with the a/an alternation).
- This does not mean that it is a regular sound shift. It never was. It always only effected this one word
This is empirically incorrect. It also affected my/mine in exactly the same environment, and at the same time (12th cent. to 14th cent.) because, as mentioned, sound change is regular and exceptionless in its environment.
Now, let me ask you a question.
About the a/an alternation, you say that āin every instance it occurs, it demonstrably eases the pronunciationā, but you never say how it eases the pronunciation, or what that even means to you. I, on the other hand, have given you thorough explanations and theoretical underpinnings for my position at every turn.
So, if it ādemonstrably eases the pronunciationā, then please do demonstate it. Whatās the strict, rigorous, definition of āeasing pronunciationā (or whatever we want to call this) that youāre using here, and how is it useful? That is, how does it make useful predictions about the data?
Because currently, your definition feels like something like āit feels better to speakersā or some equally un-useful metric. If āit feels better to speakersā is your definition (which Iām not saying it is - thatās why I asked), then āI would have eaten the appleā would have āeasier pronunciationā than āI eaten the appleā, and I think thatās a bad result for your position.
My definition would probably be something like: āa process that leads to a repair of some sort (by addition, deletion, etc.) to avoid a sound string that is disallowed by a languageās phonotacticsā.
No other process would be easing pronunciation, because all other strings would be allowed by the languageās phonotactics.
And, since the sound sequence represented by the āa/anā alternation is clearly allowed elsewhere by Englishās phonotactics, this process cannot, by definition, be easing pronunciation.
If your theoretical framework doesnāt allow something that happens, isnāt that rather bad for the framework than for reality?
I suppose that depends on oneās perspective, but since youāre a functionalist, it certainly makes sense that youād see it that way.
If oneās framework doesnāt allow something that happens, thatās a good thing, because it means that the model is falsifiable, and therefore scientific. Since, as you correctly stated, all models are wrong, it should be the case that a good framework doesnāt allow something that happens if youāre actually doing science.
This is exactly my problem with Role and Reference Grammar, and functionalism in general - itās not falsifiable. Everything they do is descriptive - they just restate their data a dozen times in a dozen different ways and call it a day, without actually explaining anything. Nothing can prove them wrong, because they never actually say anything in the first place.
Of course they would want their models to be able to account for literally everything that could possibly happen, because they need to have room to describe it, whatever it is, and they donāt care about making useful predictions.
Unfortunately, a model that is powerful enough to account for everything is, of course, also too powerful to actually do anything useful.
This is exactly why generative models are so specific and constrained - we want our models to be proven wrong by new data, so that we can revise them into better, more accurate models.
Luckily for me, though, none of the data youāve brought up in this comment comes anywhere close to creating a problem for either the regularity of sound change, or generative linguistics in general.
A bit about me in return, I suppose.
I received my PhD in Linguistics in the mid-late 2000s focusing on the core subfields (generative phonology, morphology, and syntax) and historical linguistics, and then worked as an assistant professor for around five years, teaching, publishing, and supervising theses, before finally leaving the field for industry about ten years ago (though I try to stay relatively current on research).
(Two more comments this time as well.)
To start off, its clear that our theoretical assumptions are irreconcilable (I might go so far as to say ādiametrically opposedā), and that we are not going to agree here, but its important to note that my model is perfectly able to capture your German data.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one.
It was a great example. Thereās no such thing as a bad example, because sound change is equally regular in every natural human language.
Yes, the vast majority of theoretical linguists, and practically all historical linguistics, both in America and in Europe (with much of the best European work still coming from Germany and the Netherlands), very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, because as far as we can tell, itās an empirical fact.
Also note that itās impossible to prove language relatedness without the regularity of sound change. Regularity of correspondence is literally the only metric we have that can prove relatedness, so if the Neogrammarian Hypothesis were somehow disproven (which is very unlikely), then the scientific underpinnings of the way we group languages into families immediately collapses.
(Also, yes, hypercorrection is another form of analogy, often called āinterdialectic analogyā.)
This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we donāt know all the rule or are there ārealā exceptions?
This is a great question, and technically itās still unproven (and may never be), but the hypothesis has been borne out in so much data for so many decades, with no convincing counterexamples, that there seems to be no good reason to disbelieve it.
OH! I should include the most important reason why the regularity of sound change is considered by most western linguists to be scientifically reliable - it makes predictions that are borne out by new data.
(This is an oversimplication of the events, because the data is complex and goes beyond the scope of our discussion here, but the (wikipedia page)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory] is fairly good if youāre interested.)
Basically, in the late 1800s, scholars working on reconstructing Proto-Indo-European were a bit confused - the reconstructed sound system (which is reconstructible, of course, due to the regularity of sound change) seemed to have two different systems of vowel alternations - a system unheard of in any of the worldās languages.
Ferdinand de Saussure (yes, that Ferdinand de Saussure) realized that he could collapse both systems into one by positing an unspecified series of sonorant consonants (his famous coefficients sonantiques) that colored adjacent vowels in specific environments before disappearing entirely in all of the daughter languages. This resulted in a much simpler system that was also more typologically likely.
His contemporaries ridiculed him for reconstructing a proto-sound that disappeared in all of the daughter languages, but, once Hittite was deciphered in the early 1900s, shortly after de Saussure died, every single place de Saussure had predicted his ācoefficients sonantiquesā to show up in the proto-language, Hittite had an āhā.
None of this is possible without the regularity of sound change, and weāve seen the theory make predictions that are borne out by new data again and again.
Yes, linguists very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, both in the US and in Europe.
a factor you forgot to address is frequency
I didnāt forget anything. While frequency is clearly a factor in language change, itās not relevant for sound change since it reduces to a prosody/stress change, which is a describable regular phonological environment that can be acted upon by regular sound rules.
In your āhabenā example, for example, the grammaticalization of a main verb to an auxiliary verb clearly establishes a new prosodic pattern, which can be acted upon by regular sound change to the exclusion of other main verbs.
We see similar alternations in English main/auxiliary verb pairs:
Iāve already eaten. BUT
*Iāve a cheesburger. (In American English - Brits can do this)
Iām gonna eat a cheeseburger. BUT
*Iām gonna the store.
This is, of course, expected, since the grammaticalization of main verbs into auxiliary verbs results in a different stress/prosodic pattern (which Iām sure you can feel in German with āhabenā as well), and so itās a perfect location for a regular and exceptionless sound rule to occur.
And these phenomena (and likely āhabenā's case also, though Iām not familiar with the literature) have been thoroughly treated in generative and historical literature perfectly satisfactorily for exactly this reason.
This is a common mistake made by those trying to ādisproveā the Regularity of Sound Change - they donāt invest enough time in phonology to understand that phonological domains larger than the word exist. Itās actually kind of funny how elementary all of the ācounterexamplesā critics bring up always are - youād think people would understand that a field thatās over two hundred years old would have come across auxiliary verbs at some point during that time.
Also, youāve asserted that āhabenā's change is not due to analogy or interdialectic borrowing, but Iām not sure where your certainty is coming from here. Without looking more deeply into the phenomenon, at this point the data youāve presented could easily be described by sound change, analogy, or borrowing, and though Iām not familiar with that data specifically, I have no doubt that one or a combination of the three fully explains the data (because, again, one or a combination of the three fully explains literally all historical data that weāve found so far).
You repeat that like a dogma but donāt give any logical explanation.
I mean, itās an empirical fact of language going all the way back to de Saussure and Jan Boudoin de Courtenayās insight that phonemes have regular and predictable relationships with their allophones, but luckily thereās also a clear physiological explanation for the regularity of synchronic phonology as well. (Itās interesting that youāre so interested in āexplanationā now, but weāll get to that later).
The explanation comes from a combination of the nature of the movement of the articulators, and the fact that (as de Saussure famously noted), language is a regular system composed entirely of contrasts.
Humans articulate language by moving their articulators in a surprisingly small number of regular, precise, complex movements that they have been practicing since they acquired their language in childhood.
These movements eventually become second nature to the speakers, but humans always feel a constant pull between wanting the system to be as simple as possible (leading to regular sound change - our āease of articulationā here), and wanting the system to have enough contrasts to adequately encode meaning.
Thatās why phonology is regular. Thatās it. Itās a consequence of the nature of human articulation. Every time an American English speaker pronounces a /t/ between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel in a word, that /t/ becomes a flap, because of these millions of practiced, unconscious movements.
Note that this also means that American English speakers literally cannot (without practice) produce a different /t/ allophone in that position in one specific word when speaking fluently. If the pronunciation of intervocalic /t/ were to change in one word, it must change in all of them (unless a different specific environment catalyzes a different regular change), because that sequence of articulator movements functions as a single unit.
Once again, itās an empirical fact that phonology is regular, and the regularity of sound change follows from it.
Also, the fact that synchronic phonology is regular is further proven by the fact that itās difficult to pronounce foreign language sounds. The mechanism is the same: we are only accustomed to pronouncing the relatively small set of regular movements in our native language, and altering those is difficult. Itās just as difficult, if not more so, to spontaneously begin pronouncing one word in a way that doesnāt conform to a languageās phonotactics.
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussureās famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the āphonetic easingā process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
Youāve attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong ātheā and ātoā are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, youāll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I donāt think youāll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
Itās traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparskyās 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example thatās pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data weāre dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
So, in order for the āease of pronunciationā constraint youāre referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
This is why I donāt think youāll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, thereās an ānā before vowels and no ānā before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, āmy/mineā no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I donāt believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon (āfossilizedā) and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
(Note: Both of these alternations are morphologically/lexically-conditioned allomorphy, if youāre interested.)
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
Sorry for the late response - yesterday was a crazy day IRL. I think my reply here is too long, so Iāll have to break it into two comments.
You have quite a few serious misconceptions about linguistic concepts in general here, so Iām going to try to go topic by topic to address them, and hopefully by the end the idea will become clearer:
The first serious misconception is your idea that āsound change isnāt that regularā.
It was discovered in the second half of the 1800s by a German group of young researchers called the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) that sound change is in fact completely regular and exceptionless in its environment. This is called the Neogrammarian Hypothesis, or just āThe Regularity of Sound Changeā, and itās the foundation for all of historical linguistics (as well as being the advance that led to the discovery (by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the rest of the oft-ignored Kazan School in the late 1800s) 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 youāre 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 occur after the sound change, and are always due to either: 1. Analogical processes or 2. Borrowing/Lexical Innovation.
Note, however, that the initial sound change will have been perfectly regular in its environment (because, again, thatās 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, itās 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 languageās synchronic phonology. This is the answer to your question: āWhen did it stop ease the articulation?ā)
(This is often a better test for when āeasing articulationā stops than analogy - if a language can borrow a word or alternation with that pattern, then that pattern must not be disallowed by that languageās 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.
On to an example. Iām so glad you picked ālistenā - itās perfect for our purposes. This sound change is completely regular, as it turns out; itās 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, ātā 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, āWhat about often? It perfectly fits this environment, but in my dialect (maybe) itās pronounced with the ātā!ā What happened here is whatās called āspelling pronunciationā, which is a type of Analogy.
Once the phonotactics of the language have changed (after all of these 'tās have been removed from the language, the phonotactic constraints of the language changed, and these sequences were allowed again (there just werenāt any present for a while - an āaccidental gapā)). Then, speakers a few generations later began to pronounce āoftenā specifically with a ātā due to its spelling (likely in a misguided attempt to sound more ācorrectā), and we now have what appears to be an exception to a perfectly regular sound change, even though itās not really an exception - the sound change affected āoftenā just the same, but then another process came along and changed it afterward.
(Note that only āoftenā 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, sound change is perfectly regular in its environment, and if it looks like it isnāt, 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 arenāt any others.
Note that what youāve said here:
Language change often effects some words, or a single one but not others.
is technically correct, but only because youāre conflating sound change and analogy. Sound change is regular, while analogy is not. (Check out Sturtevantās Paradox for more about this - itās fun, though itās a bit orthogonal to our discussion here.)
And many other measures besides.
I donāt think thatās accurate, but Iād be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasnāt able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didnāt look very long, and there may very well be one).
Also, Iām pretty sure that for the dialects that do use āstrong theā, they also use āstrong aā in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes it 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 ānā 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 doesnāt make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be āeasing pronunciationā.
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 donāt, though. This is clear from the fact that ātheā occurs in exactly the same phonetic environment (including the lack of stress), with exactly the same vowel, and it doesnāt show the same behavior. This data tells us that thereās 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 ānā inserted to repair the hiatus the way we do with /r/ in many dialects (which one could analyze as an example of āeasing pronunciationā, depending on oneās assumptions, though I probably wouldnāt with all of the deserved stigma around the ill-defined idea of āeasing pronunciationā). This is telling us that this alternation has nothing to do with āease of pronunciationā, since speakers clearly donāt need their pronunciation eased in this environment.
As for āstrong theā specifically, we see a parallel form in āstrong aā, which can also be argued to end with a yod, and which seems to alternate under the same conditions as āstrong theā in most dialects, whatever those conditions are. For this reason, I donāt really think āstrong theā is very relevant to the discussion.
When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for āease of articulationā 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 āease of pronunciationā, well, sure, maybe, but itās pretty clear from Modern English data that the āa/anā alternation has nothing to do with ease of articulation at all.
Itās a dichotomy because something either eases pronunciation, or it doesnāt, and in this case, the data makes it clear that it doesnāt. It may feel āeasierā to speakers because it sounds wrong to them without it, but thatās due to morphophonology, not phonotactics, and itās why we rely on tests like the above instead of speaker intuition whenever possible.
How about this: letās take the f/v morphophonemic alternation in leaf/leaves, knife/knives, etc.
Thereās a decent argument to be made that this medial voicing change in Old English was originally to āease pronunciationā, but once this alternation became morphophonemic, the āease of articulationā argument falls apart pretty quickly.
I donāt think any serious linguist would assert that itās ālife/livesā in Modern English due to āease of pronunciationā instead of āhistorical accidentā when āfife/fifesā and countless other later borrowings do not show the same alternation, and the āa/anā alternation is this exact same sort of morphophonemic process.
So much badlinguistics in this subthread.
Edit: Instead of responding to individual comments, Iāll just put whatās going on with āaā and āanā here:
This alternation is a morphophonological process (specifically a sandhi alternation), whereby in native, fluent speech for most dialects of English, āaā is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a consonant, and āanā is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a vowel.
In contrast to what many people in this subthread seem to think, this is NOT to āease pronunciationā. This is easily demonstrable since āaā and ātheā have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get āa catā but āan appleā, we donāt get āthe catā, but āthen appleā. This alternation, therefore, is not a regular part of English speakersā phonology (that is, part of the regular, unconscious processes that occur between sounds in all environments), but rather an idiosyncratic part of Englishās morphophonology, in that itās a phonological process that only happens in the presence of certain morphemes (simple words or word-pieces).
Why is this the case? Because āanā was originally just the word āoneā that became reduced over time until it took on its own separate grammatical function, and later there was a regular sound change whereby ānā was deleted in certain specific unstressed environments before consonants, leaving an accidental alternation between āaā and āanā as a result of sound change.
This means that the āaā/āanā alternation in Modern English is not to āease pronunciationā in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), itās just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.
We know this is the case because the exact same thing happened to āmineā, and in earlier dialects of English there was a similar alternation, āmy catā, but āmine uncleā. This alternation later collapsed in most dialects into our modern my/mine distinction, adding further evidence to the conclusion that this is not a phonological alternation, but a morphophonological one.
What all of this means, is that for a native English speaker that still has an āa/anā distinction (I donāt have one in my dialect, for example - I put āaā before everything when speaking fluently: āa catā, āa appleā), if they donāt put a pause between āaā and āIāmā to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say āan Iāmā, and if they do put a pause between āaā and āIāmā to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say āa Iāmā.
Because āaā and āmindsetā arenāt in a local configuration to each other, they will have no morphophonological influence on each other whatsoever (just like in āan able mindsetā, for example).
So, while I wonāt say that saying āitās āaā because of āmindsetāā is wrong (because right/wrong arenāt really useful terms when describing language), I will say that it does not conform to the linguistic behavior of native English speakers when speaking fluently.
Feel free to respond to this comment with any follow-up questions you have, and Iāll be happy to answer them.
I kinda unironically dig this.
I mean, yeah. Two different things can be true at the same time.
Time to spend a billion dollars lobbying to prevent their sale in the US instead of investing that money in actual innovation that would make their products competitive.
This is the correct answer. Thereās even a slight plastic indentation to let the user know that both of the buttons in question are āstartā buttons.
I think the design is fine.