nobody talks about how weird it is that a common way for phonemic distinctions in languages to develop is when there's a single phoneme that has different allophones in different context and some aspect of the conditioning environment for an allophone disappears but they keep saying the allophone in words that used to have the right environment and therefore they're now in distinction
like why do we keep using the old (former-)allophone instead of changing to what would normally be expected in that environment.
@gaditb okay extremely cool pull, but ngl my second reaction (the preceding having been both my first and third reactions) was "damnit this also has no discussion of how or why they continue to fly the possibly formerly better route instead of a now more direct one"
@Satsuma @gaditb well i think it's probably a safe assumption that the butterflies don't know that. my question is how do they know what route to take (and how does that knowledge get preserved through the presumed millennia)?