The underrated significance of smaller dialects

As you already well know, all languages either have or will have lesser dialects. Dialectical differentiation is a part of the evolution of languages, always has been, and always will be. It just is.

To make things even better for the historical linguist, all languages today are descended from prior dialects of previous languages, sometimes several dialects at a time. Sometimes, two languages may "combine" to form a new language. We can discuss creoles and pigins another day....

In the earlier history of english, there were many instances where Old English dialects contributed different things to what became Middle English, and on from dialects of Middle English into Modern. Just as an example. Sometimes, two dialects can produce different outcomes, and sometimes both outcomes will survive in a common dialect. Like is with the pronunciation of "bury" after the vowel shifts.

It's kinda a perfect example, though not really, since by now the different pronunciations are still so similar that most don't even notice it. Though they may also only sound similar to my english ears, because differentiating vowels in this highly intercommunicative language can be difficult, when one is so familiar with different dialects that one may be suprised that some are even mutually intelligible still!

Anyway, back to "bury".....

It's pronounced either /bəɻi/ or /bɛːɻi/.

From what I've read on the internet, take it for true or not, most dialects originally had these pronunciations as seperate outcomes based on soundlaws that occurred towards the end of Middle English. One of the two would have become the outcome in London-type english, and the other Southern English; But both wound up in London English due to them just liking the way it was pronounced in the south more.

Though where I'm from, its basically pronounced either way, there is no difference between the two as they're pretty much interchangeable. Though bəɻi tends to be used more in the past tense and bɛːɻi in the present or future tense. I'm not sure if this is common elsewhere, as I haven't really seen it described anywhere, but definitely seems to be a holdout from the old english ablaut (though may very well not be).

I've noticed that at times, small inconsistencies in reconstructing earlier types of sound changes may lead to the declaration that we either:

1) Can't reconstruct a sound accurately on the basis of said small sound change descrepancies
2) Need to invoke new phonemes that should have existed on the basis of those descrepancies
3) Need to declare that all languages evolved from Lithuanian, Vedic, Aryan, Insert-Language, etc....

Okay, so the third was kind of a joke....

Though descrepancies tend to be the rule, not the exception. Not all dialects of a language survive themselves, though sometimes they'll leave behind traces of themselves in cousin-languages. These traces may then be found by a historical linguist being unable to reconstruct a form in a historical language, because it violates the rules, sometimes very much so.

West Slavic Project

Procrastination.... my worst enemy. My own fault being that I started with a family I'm unfamiliar with prior to present, but at least there's more familiarity now than there was. It doesn't help that the new laptop doesn't have the proper fonts, and I'm weary about downloads, nor that my word processor keeps crashing so I've basically left things on the backburner.

Maybe I need a break from my work. My notebooks are full, I lack any kind of real excuse for my lack of progress. Just that I don't want to have to deal with the problems. Guess that's where things stand. Trying to find a different approach, maybe set a schedule and limit distractions.

My worst enemy is my own attention span.

Pronominal, Case, and Verbal Similarities between unrelated languages

It's funny how similar unrelated languages can be. It seems like, as much as there are mechanisms in place to drive languages apart with time, there's also mechanisms in place to bring them closer together. The more different groups communicate, the more similar their languages become (while at the same time distinct from how they used to be).

My instinct is to question how some apparently unrelated systems can come to mirror eachother nearly identically. Do entire pronominal systems, or even nominal declension systems get borrowed from one language to another? One look at Northeast Caucasian, and right away you'll see a system very similar to that of the IndoEuropean languages, but also the Uralic languages. Or maybe they developed independantly, can we know?

Go to the americas, and nearly the entirety of the two continents' languages have deeply embedded similarities. Some say there are 3 main groupings, but most of the "amerind" languages seem quite similar to the EskimoAluet and often the NaDene languages if analyzed in the same way individual Amerind languages were analyzed.

Are languages and their systems really that unanalyzeable and unreconstructible at vast time distances? What if there's enough surviving languages to build more data? I get that we may never take Burushaski and trace it back to some distant ancestor; being that it's just Burushaski and its many dialects that survive, kinda like Basque.....

But with the IndoEuropean languages, there are so many descendants, that we can reconstruct with a fair bit of confidence ProtoIndoEuropean and at least three major dialects, with hints at how it may have existed internally at a PreProtoIndoEuropean level! Quite astonishing, but probably only possible with the volume of data that exists for that family.