Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?

                  When the word meet changed from /me:t/ to /mi:t/ in English there did not seem to be any advantage in the fact that one sound was replaced by another. On the other hand, when the word them replaced hem it disambiguated the system. So, instead of having a lot of similar sounds like him, her, hem, for example, we have him, her, them.

      What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?

                  There are many differences. Probably the main one is that Milroy takes a sociolinguistic or variationist view of the language change while the Neogrammarians see language as an entity which is somehow separate from people. For Milroy, languages change because people change it. According to the Neogrammarians, the changes in language almost seem to be destined to happen as if the language were, for example, a biological entity.Neogrammarians believed that sound changes obeyed rules and that the exceptions to the rules could also be explained by other rules, and so on. Milroy mentions the example of front-rising (in the example, /a:/ changes to /ae/; that is the lower sound is replaced by a “higher sound”, that is the tongue is nearer to the roof of the mouth. If you pronounce the a: in far /fa:/, your tongue is lower than in the sound cat  /kaet/. In New York City words like cab, hat, etc. have gone from /haet/,/kaeb/ to something like /het/, /keb/). For obvious reasons the Neogrammarians generally used written documents- even for the present state of the language.

      According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)

      Language changed depends on the people and sociolinguistic conditions- not on the internal life of a language, which is a concept that Milroy does not believe in.

      Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?

      What actually happens is that one sound is replaced by another.

      Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?

                  Because sound change depends on people not on the internal “life” of a language.

      What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?

      This means that rather than a sound being replaced by another throughout the whole language, the change takes place through word families or in particular phonetic contexts. For example, “-ise” at the end of many words was pronounced /i:/ then /əi/ and then /ai/ as it is nowadays. Neogrammarians and the like thought that the sound /i:/ changed to /əi/ happened throughout the whole language but in actual fact it happened first in some words and then in others. Moreover, a new pronunciation replacing an old one would be sufficiently different so as to be noticeable, otherwise how would it spread?

      What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)

      When one particular variety of a language is displaced by another. He gives the example of New Zealand English which used to be very much like Southern British English but is now more like Australian English.

      What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?

                  “Community” or “vernacular” norms are the norms operating within a language community. For example, Standard Valencian has aleshores but for many Valencians that sounds too Catalan so they use a borrowed Spanihs word entonces. In certain  contexts if you use the word  aleshores,  you will be considered to be an outsider. In other cases, if you use entonces, you would be considered vulgar. We have used the term “non- standard varieties”.

      What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?

      H-dropping is common in Cockney. One might say it is the norm. However, throughout England /h/ is the norm. In other places, people use /h/ in certain contexts. Any change might stop or there may be a change back to a former system.

  Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?

      Speaker innovation occurs when an individual uses, for example, a particular pronunciation, or coins a new word. Other speakers might imitate this pronunciation. If this innovation is incorporated into the language system, then a change can be said to have occurred. In this case of one sound replacing another we can imagine how a person might use an innovative pronunciation and how it night spread through a group of speakers to the wider community. As Milroy says, many innovations are ephemeral and lead nowhere.

   Why isn’t borrowing from one language to another and the replacement of one sound by another through speaker innovation with a language as radically different as the Neogrammarians posited (154-6)?

      Intra-language (within a language) and inter-language (between languages) borrowing are similar. Imagine a speaker in your language innovates and coins a new word or phrase. Gradually other people “borrow” or adopt the word or phrase and it finally becomes widespread. For example, por un tubo. In a similar way, people start using the word speed from the English word for amphetamine. From this word we get the adjective espitoso.

   What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?

                  Change, if it happens, must happen within a speech community. This community must adopt an innovation. For this to happen social conditions must be favourable. Weak ties within a society favour change whereas closely-knit communities normally disfavour change.

  Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?

      If you believe in blind necessity you must believe that there is an entity –the standard- That is changing through internal forces that hve nothing to do with speakers.

   What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?

Standard varieties are engineered varieties of a language. In other words, the guardians of the language (for example, la RAE) dictate which words are allowed into a dictionary and which structures are permitted or not. This is clean data –it has been cleaned up. Dirty data, on the other hand, is when we describe a variety of a language –its inconsistencies such as, for instance, the examples we have seen in class in which both questions with and without do are found in the same variety. A diachronic example is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in which two ways of forming the interrogative exist: But why did not you look for the steps? / How camest thou by the burden at first? Think of the pronunciations of dado/da¶o/ and /dao/. Only one is standard but we all know that both co-exist.

Indoeuropean Radio Transcription

Radio Sunrise serves the West London community of mixed races- Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb. What could these two languages, Punjabi and English, have in common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi and Gujurati are related-  something discovered by chance 200 years ago by an English lawyer, Sir William Jones. He was a judge who went out to India in 1783, but he had studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India, he became very interested and learnt Sanscrit, which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A.D., and then he realised, he made this great discovery, that Sanscit resembles in some way, has relationships with Latin and other languages, and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these were sprung from some common source.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanscrit, on the right, bares a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. While one, two and three are obvious, four and five need a closer look to spot the connection. Linguists have discovered rules that govern how sounds in different languages are related. Look at the words for “four”. This is one of many examples where a word beginning with “q” in Latin say, is similar to a Greek word beginning with “t”, or a Sanscrit word beginning with “k”. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family. The question is how can you tell that the languages that you’re looking at reflect a single original language and therefore form a family. The only way you can do that is by finding sistematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar, similarities in sounds, similartities in their inflexions, in the syntax of the language, and so forth, and the similarities have to be very precise, and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family to be believable. If we look at an English word like“tooth”, and see that in Hindi it’s“dant”, and that by itself that doesn’t mean that much, but you take a look at English “ten”, which ends up in Hindi as“das”, and the same pattern emerges- you have got an initial “t” in English and and initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the new word, in English, shows up in Hindo as “do”, once agin an initial“t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. You begin to think that this is not an accident.

Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even reconstruct the earlier ancestor of these languages- Proto Indoeuropean.