Noncompositional

While researching some historic uses of SAI in English, I came upon an interesting passage from A Sixth Booke to the Coutesse of Pembrokes Arcadia from 1624.

Shamefac’t Cherrie, blush no more, Nor esteeme your beauties store To be lessened, cause you see Her lips excell much worth may bee In your Vermillion, though no eye Can discerne a paritie.

And I thought: huh? Surely that couldn’t be an abbreviated version of because…or could it? And so I, as now (temporarily) anyone can do, looked up “cause” in the OED. I found this:

1. (with of) = BECAUSE of, on account of. 1513 BRADSHAW St. Werburge (1848) 184 Churches..were gyuen To god and saynt Werburge cause of deuocion.

A use without the “of” comes in 1556. Of course, the OED notes that this usage is “now only dial., or vulgar.” So pepper your formal documents with cause. Just be prepared to back it up with a little historical precedent.

(And no, there’s no SAI in the passage above. It continues, “You worthy were to set at odds, / As did the Apple, all the Godds:”)

I just discovered a paper published last year in Linguistic Inquiry, that perhaps should be of interest to people thinking about constructional approaches to language, and more indirectly, how constructions should relate to diachrony.

den Dikken, Marcel. 2005. Comparative Correlatives Comparatively, LI 36(4): 497-532

A recent post by Matt ponders some historical Japanese phonology, particularly the loss of (some instances of) intervocalic /m/ and the fusion of /au/ to /oo/ (written <ou> おう) in modern Japanese, though only rarely pronounced such. I’d guess that the change was, put simply, [ɑmu] > [ɑ̃ũ] > [ou] (> [o:]).

In fact, through my study of Japanese as a second language, even before I started to learn about language change and common paths of phonological change, I noticed a certain type of pattern of sound change in Japanese occurring both in history and synchronically. Namely, weakening of labial stops. In addition to the the above change, also mentioned in this languagelog post by Bill Poser, there is also the well-known p > ɸ > f changes from Classical to Old to Modern Japanese, which gives kawa from kapa (river), and lies dormant in compounds like tabi-bito ‘traveler’ (didn’t get that? Look up rendaku). p is also preserved in non-intervocalic environments like geminates and post-nasally. And of course, I need not mention the loss of w before all vowels but ɑ. Read more »