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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2005-04-10 12:15:51
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
> As for sound changes, you and Mr. Christ both state that they are
> not random, but aren't there ANY exceptions to the rule? I observe
> them in modern English all the time, and some of them eventually take
> hold. Also, since the writers of Old English didn't have
> standardized spelling, couldn't they have blundered just as
> happily as the rest of us?
As Peter Tunstall already noted, there is analogy, which serves to obscure the regular outcomes of sound changes. I wouldn't think of analogy so much as an exception to the regularity of sound changes. I think the right way to look at it is this: sound change are regular, and analogy is a separate event or process which happens _after_ a sound change has gone to completion, messing up the originally regular outcomes. For example, the analogical change of day/dawes to day/days happened well after the regular sound changes which produced the differences in the singular and plural forms.
It's true that there are such things as taboo deformation, folk etymology, etc., which can change the form of a word; these are processes outside regular sound change. However, regular sound change explains the overwhelming majority of the data. I've been doing historical linguistics for a long time, and I still am sometimes amazed at the regularity when I look at some cognate set that I haven't seen before. The regularity is not some construct imagined by the linguists; it is something out there in reality.
As a methodological matter, you should assume that there is nothing but regular sound change and well-motivated analogy. Historical linguistics can't be done in a principled way if you don't assume this; if you say that sound change isn't regular, then you can't make testable predictions. If there's a word whose form is unexpected, then this should be considered something which remains to be explained, possibly by discovery of a previously discovered sound change. The exceptions to regularity should only be invoked as a sort of special pleading when there's clear evidence in the particular case for the particular non-regular process. In prehistory, such evidence is usually wanting.
Spelling doesn't have anything to do with it, since sound changes affect the spoken language. The sound changes affect the spelling only indirectly. Spoken languages with no writing system undergo the same processes of change as spoken languages which do have a writing system.
--Sean