Suboptimist

Neogrammarians versus Dialectologists: the Ultimate Showdown, Pt. 2

I should clarify that there was actually no organized movement against the comparative method called the Dialectologists. Really, I just like the idea of a showdown and I know a certain clergyman who will only read things with ‘versus’ in the title. You should pay attention to what I am saying, since it turns out that I do know what I am talking about, or at least I know enough of what I am talking about to nail my recent historical linguistics test and comparative method assignments.

Anyway, in the last installment of this discussion, I explained briefly what the comparative method is and laid out basic assumptions of it. I also brought up what is often called the Neogrammarian Manifesto, sound laws suffer no exceptions. I left off stating that *k > ∫ is recognized as a regular sound change (as well as a change we see commonly in other languages).

A challenge came from some scholars, many of whom happened to be dialectologists, who didn’t buy the position that sound change is regular and exceptionless. They also opposed the family tree model. They also had their own slogan, each word has its own history. The alternative to regularity hypothesis and the family tree model was the ‘wave theory.’

Stated simply, the wave model assumed that language change was the result of borrowing from languages and dialects. These changes spread outward, like waves, and become weaker the further away from the innovation’s origin. A word’s history could be the result of influence from any direction, so in theory each word could have a history different from any other word. When we take this approach, historical linguistics is reduced to a study of etymologies.

Proponents of the wave model cited an example from the French dialects of Normandy. Proto-romance *k > ∫ before front vowels and a in [standard] French. However, in parts of Normandy, a bunch of words retain the k. The words that did this were (taken from Campbell 2004:213):

chaine < catena 'chain'
chambre < camera 'room'
champ < campus 'field'
Chandeleur < Candelamas (church candle) < candela
chandelle < candela 'candel'
chanson < cantio(n-) 'song'
chanter < cantare 'to sing'
chat < cattu 'cat'

Opponents of the regularity hypothesis took this as a contradiction to the hypothesis. Words like ‘cat’ were more resistant to the *k > ∫ change, while prestigious words like those associated with the church more readily accepted the *k > ∫ change.

Here is the thing: we can’t recognize these words as exceptions to the regular *k > ∫ change if we don’t recognize the *k > ∫ sound change as regular. Still, these are indeed exceptions to the strict exceptionlessness of sound change. Clearly both are needed, and now I don’t know what else to say.

Questions? Comments? Concerns?