CaoimhínSF wrote:
Just to be clear, I didn't say that umlaut had anything to do with the acquisition of writing, just that the concept of grammar was not something which the pre-literate Germanic speakers thought about.
Then I don't understand what you mean by "only acquired a grammatical aspect". I assumed you were talking about the process of
grammaticalisation. If you're not, then the claim seems basically vacuous.
CaoimhínSF wrote:
As in German, extension of sound changes to situations where they did not originally occur also happened in Irish. For example, eclipsis now occurs after the number 8 (ocht), by analogy to what happens with the numbers 7, 9, and 10, even though the number 8 did not originally end in a nasal sound (which is what caused eclipsis originally).
Analogical change occurs in all human languages that have been studied, including both Irish and English. Look at how plurals are formed, for instance.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
