I Don't Know — I don't think there's ever a case where dialectal...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
max1461
max1461

@siberian-khatru-72 to revive an old discussion on neogrammarianism: evidently the trap-bath split was caused by partial progression of a sound change through the lexicon? Is there an alternate explanation for it?

max1461

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I don’t think there’s ever a case where dialectal borrowing is unreasonable, even if putative donor dialects aren’t independently evidenced. For a language spoken several thousand years ago, why would they be? The relevant question is, IMO, does dialectal borrowing leave any kind of structural trace?

Like, I don’t think there can be any reasonable debate over the fact that the neogrammarian hypothesis is approximately true. And I don’t think there’s any debate over the fact that it has some per se exceptions (random metathesis, etc) and some apparent exceptions (analogy, interdialectal loans). The question for the historical linguist is then: are there any other kinds of systematicity to these (apparent) exceptions that can be leveraged to do better reconstruction?

If there isn’t systematicity to the (apparent) exceptions, then you’re basically just adding a random error term to all the predictions you use the neogrammarian hypothesis for—e.g., all historical linguistics. The more you can find systematicity in the exceptions, the smaller you can make that error term and the better you can do reconstruction. The nice thing about analogy is that, broadly speaking, it looks like something particular. We have some understanding of analogy as a phenomenon. This is why you can say “this evident exception to [sound change] in the history of [language] was a result of analogy with [form]”, and people can find that argument more or less compelling based on the details. It’s not perfect, because analogy is still unpredictable, but the known structure of analogy can be leveraged for the end of doing historical linguistics better.

The thing that troubles me about interdialectal loans is that, unless we have attestation of multiple dialects, interdialectal loan vocabulary may not have any evident patterns. It’s undetectable from structural factors alone (actually, I think this is probably not true if you have many many loans from the same dialect, but for one-off loans it’s undetectable). Now, we can say that we expect the number of one-off dialectal loans to be small, and that’s good, but it would be better to be able to bound that error term even more tightly.

So, yeah, I think the loan hypothesis is reasonable here as it is everywhere, the trouble is that it’s not useful.

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