Paths of least resistance

Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass,  mentioned in several posts before, explores an extended metaphor about language development and the path of least resistance in language acquisition;  I hope to  cite it in an update, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

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Readers of the past 500 posts on this blog may have come to the conclusion that this sort of faith is sometimes misplaced. I've had a good look, and think it must have been a different author – Steven Pinker maybe; but I've done a Prospero  on the relevant book (except that in his case Sue Ryder wasn't involved). So the source of this extended metaphor must remain a mystery.
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Whoops – right author, wrong book (a better one, if I remember right): The Unfolding of Language. 

But I'm not sure that 'extended metaphor' does the passage justice. It is more of a fable, which seems to describe an unlikely tale called The Elders of Idleford: not so unlikely, as it turns out, since the very mechanism for language change that it describes, actually happened in English's treatment of 'hot'.  A future post will say more.
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In an early post  (nearly five years ago – a few months before the Brexit referendum, if you remember those halcyon days, when we had so much to look forward to) I discussed the way 'ain't' is so useful to learners of English as a Second Language (and to anyone acquiring the language):

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The fortunes of the word ain't provide a good example of the way language learners take the line of least resistance. Put yourself in the position of a European immigrant to America in the 18th or 19th century. The paradigm of the indicative of the verb be is not at all straightforward, especially in the negative:

• I am not, I'm not, [and not so long ago I amn't]
• You are not, You're not, You aren't
• He/she/it is not* (etc etc..., you get the idea)

How much easier than all these variants (with attendant phonological complications – for example, the vowel ['22 clarification: in the subject pronoun] does not  change between 'I'm not' and 'I am not', but it does change between 'You are not' and 'You're not' [but it's unchanged again in 'You aren't']) is the word ain't:

• I ain't
• You [sing.] ain't
• He/she/it ain't
• We ain't
• You [pl.] ain't
• They ain't

Language Nazis may deprecate this usage, but it certainly makes the language learner's life much simpler. 

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A similar (the mechanism is not the same – the motive is though) change happened with the phrase 'for aught I now'. This usage graph from the Collins online dictionary shows the decline of 'aught':

'Aught' has had mixed fortunes; it was big in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dwindled during the twentieth, and virtually disappeared in the twenty-first – living on, I suspect, among the few grey-hairs who insist on saying 'for aught I know' in preference to 'for all I know'.

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This conjecture could be tested, but I don't have the corpus nous to do it.  If you  know how, be my guest.
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That phrase itself ('for aught I know' , rather than the version with 'all') is far from common: 11 is just over .01% of 817:

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I've used COCA because the Collins online dictionary doesn't mention it in its 'British English' entries
but does under 'American English'

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But that isn't the whole story. Though rarely outnumbering the 'all' version (only in the first half of the nineteenth century) , the 'aught' version was once a fairly significant competitor, as this historical query  shows:

But by the end of the century the 'all' version had a clear lead, and hasn't looked back since. Why?

There may be several reasons, but I suspect the path of least resistance in language acquisition...

<linguistese>
Excuse the $10 word. I've  inherited the linguists' opposition to the term learning for what is, outside the schoolroom, a simple process of picking up the system/rules (that's rules in the descriptive rather than prescriptive sense – the observable pattern of what's actually done, rather than a hodge-podge of prescriptions that some self-styled 'authority' lays down as a law).

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... had something to do with it. 

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 (when 'for all I know' was unheard of): 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. Contrast the upward trend in this graph with the downward trend in the usage graph for 'aught' over the same period (in a US cop show they'd superimpose them at the click of a mouse, but I shall just have rely on good old imagination).

Right; enough wild surmise for one day.

b

Update: 2022.08.23,14:20 – Added <inline_ps /> after first para.

Update: 2022.08.24,12:05 – Added <inline_pps /> after that.

Update: 2022.08.30,17:20 – Added link to that.

Update: 2022.10.29,17:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've just spotted another example of this principle. On the news a few nights ago there was an interview with an Iranian woman who referred to a /'slægɔn/; from the context she obviously meant slogan, and I dismissed it at first as a one-off slip of the tongue. But she went on to use the same slip half a dozen times (if not more).

And I think I know why. There are not many English two-syllable words that use the form "-agon". I can think off the top of my head of only three - dragon, flagon (which an ESOL learner is unlikely to have met), and wagon. But they outnumber two-syllable words that use the form "-ogan"; I can think of only one, slogan - apart from  names like Hogan, Logan, and Wogan. One could cast the net wider and admit polysyllables such as agony, but that would open the door to counter-examples such as mahogany.

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In The Masochism Tango Tom Lehrer rhymed those two words.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony 

Now where was I?
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The reason for slogan's uniqueness is that it is, of course, a borrowing; and borrowings don't follow the phonological rules of more common words. Here's what Etymonline says:

slogan (n.)

1670s, earlier slogorne (1510s), "battle cry," from Gaelic sluagh-ghairm "battle cry used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans," from sluagh "army, host, slew," from Celtic and Balto-Slavic *slough- "help, service." Second element is gairm "a cry" (see garrulous). Metaphoric sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is first attested 1704.

A language-learner looks for patterns; and maybe there was an area in this Iranian speaker's brain that housed the group dragon, slagon, and wagon.

Afterthought: it's an interesting coincidence (to me, at least) that the formation of the porte-manteau word "slogan" took place on the field of battle. To most Westerners...

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(that is, speakers of British English, American English, and second-language English speakers who know the word)            

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... I imagine, the word has more associations with advertising; its use in the Iran riots is truer to its origins.

Update: 2022.10.30.12:30 – Added <inline-p⁴s />