In
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
, phonological change is any
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
that alters the distribution of
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s in a language. In other words, a language develops a new system of oppositions among its phonemes. Old contrasts may disappear, new ones may emerge, or they may simply be rearranged.
Sound change may be an impetus for changes in the phonological structures of a language (and likewise, phonological change may sway the process of sound change).
One process of phonological change is ''rephonemicization'', in which the distribution of phonemes changes by either addition of new phonemes or a reorganization of existing phonemes.
Mergers and splits are types of rephonemicization and are discussed further below.
Types
In a typological scheme first systematized by
Henry M. Hoenigswald
Henry Max Hoenigswald (17 April 1915 – 16 June 2003) was a German scholar of linguistics, who in 1939 escaped to the United States where he had a long and productive academic career as a scholar of historical linguistics at the University of ...
in 1965, a historical
sound law
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
can only affect a phonological system in one of three ways:
* Conditioned merger (which Hoenigswald calls "primary split"), in which some instances of phoneme A become an existing phoneme B; the number of phonemes does not change, only their distribution.
* Phonemic split (which Hoenigswald calls "secondary split"), in which some instances of A become a new phoneme B; this is phonemic differentiation in which the number of phonemes increases.
* Unconditioned merger, in which all instances of phonemes A and B become A; this is phonemic reduction, in which the number of phonemes decreases.
This classification does not consider mere changes in pronunciation, that is, phonetic change, even
chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
s, in which neither the number nor the distribution of phonemes is affected.
Phonetic vs. phonological change
Phonetic change can occur without any modification to the phoneme inventory or phonemic correspondences. This change is purely
allophonic
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
or subphonemic. This can entail one of two changes: either the phoneme turns into a new allophone—meaning the phonetic form changes—or the distribution of allophones of the phoneme changes.
For the most part, phonetic changes are examples of
allophonic
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
differentiation or assimilation; i.e., sounds in specific environments acquire new phonetic features or perhaps lose phonetic features they originally had. For example, the
devoicing
In phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commo ...
of the vowels and in certain environments in
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, the
nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
of
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s before
nasals (common but not universal), changes in
point of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...
of
stop
Stop may refer to:
Places
* Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States
* Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Facilities
* Bus stop
* Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck d ...
s and nasals under the influence of adjacent vowels.
Phonetic change in this context refers to the lack of phonological restructuring, not a small degree of sound change. For example,
chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
s such as the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
in which nearly all of the vowels of the English language changed or the allophonic differentiation of /s/, originally , into , do not qualify as phonological change as long as all of the
phones
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
remain in complementary distribution.
Many phonetic changes provide the raw ingredients for later phonemic innovations. In
Proto-Italic
The Proto-Italic language is the ancestor of the Italic languages, most notably Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages. It is not directly attested in writing, but has been reconstructed to some degree through the comparative method. P ...
, for example, intervocalic */s/ became *
It was a phonetic change, merely a mild and superficial complication in the phonological system, but when *
merged with */r/, the effect on the phonological system was greater. (The example will be discussed below, under conditioned merger.)
Similarly, in the prehistory of
Indo-Iranian, the
velars
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum).
Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive an ...
*/k/ and */g/ acquired distinctively
palatal
The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity.
A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separ ...
articulation before front vowels (*/e/, */i/, */ē/ */ī/), so that came to be pronounced and , but the phones and occurred only in that environment. However, when */e/, */o/, */a/ later fell together as Proto-Indo-Iranian */a/ (and */ē/ */ō/ */ā/ likewise fell together as */ā/), the result was that the allophonic palatal and velar stops now contrasted in identical environments: */ka/ and /ča/, /ga/ and /ǰa/, and so on. The difference became phonemic. (The "law of palatals" is an example of phonemic split.)
Sound changes generally operate for a limited period of time, and once established, new phonemic contrasts rarely remain tied to their ancestral environments. For example,
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
acquired "new" /ki/ and /gi/ sequences via
analogy
Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...
and borrowing, and likewise /ču/, , /čm/, and similar novelties; and the reduction of the
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
*/ay/ to Sanskrit /ē/ had no effect at all on preceding velar stops.
Merger
Phonemic merger is a loss of distinction between phonemes. Occasionally, the term reduction refers to phonemic merger. It is not to be confused with the meaning of the word "reduction" in phonetics, such as
vowel reduction
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic ''quality'' of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language
The Muscogee lang ...
, but phonetic changes may contribute to phonemic mergers. For example, in most
North American English dialects, the vowel in the word ''lot'' and vowel in the word ''palm'' have become the same sound and thus
undergone a merger. In most
dialects of England, the words ''father'' and ''farther'' are
pronounced the same due to a merger created by
non-rhoticity
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic variet ...
or "R-dropping".
Conditioned merger
Conditioned merger, or primary split, takes place when some, but not all, allophones of a phoneme, say A, merge with some other phoneme, B. The immediate results are these:
* there are the same number of contrasts as before.
* there are fewer words with A than before.
* there are more words of B than before.
* there is at least one environment for which A, for the time being, no longer occurs, called a ''gap'' in the distribution of the phoneme.
* there is, under certain circumstances, an
alternation between A and B if inflection or derivation result in A sometimes but not always being in the environment in which it merged with B.
Example from Middle English
For a simple example, without alternation, early Middle English /d/ after stressed syllables followed by /r/ became /ð/: ''módor, fæder'' > ''mother, father'' /ðr/, ''weder'' > ''weather'', and so on. Since /ð/ was already a structure-point in the language, the innovation resulted merely in more /ð/ and less /d/ and a gap in the distribution of /d/ (though not a very conspicuous one).
:Note 1: thanks to borrowing, from dialects as well as other languages, the original distribution has been disturbed: ''rudder, adder'' in Standard English (but forms with /ð/ are attested in nonstandard dialects).
:Note 2: one who knows German can figure out which cases of English /ð/ were originally /ð/ and which changed from /d/. Original /d/ corresponds to /t/ in German, and original /ð/ corresponds to /d/. Thus, ''wether'' = German ''Widder, leather = Leder, brother = Bruder, whether = weder'', pointing to original /ð/ in English; ''weather'' = German ''Wetter, father = Vater, mother = Mutter'' pointing to original /d/.
:Note 3: alternation between /d/ and /ð/ would have been a theoretical possibility in English, as in sets like ''hard, harder; ride, rider'', but any such details have been erased by the commonplace diachronic process called
morphological leveling In linguistics, morphological leveling or paradigm leveling is the generalization of an inflection across a linguistic paradigm, a group of forms with the same stem in which each form corresponds in usage to different syntactic environments, or bet ...
.
Devoicing of voiced stops in German
A trivial (if all-pervasive) example of conditioned merger is the
devoicing of voiced stops in German when in word-final position or immediately before a compound boundary (see:
Help:IPA/Standard German):
*''*hand'' "hand" > /hant/ (cf. plural ''Hände'' /ˈhɛndə/)
*''Handgelenk'' "wrist" /ˈhantgəlɛŋk/
*''*bund'' "league, association" > /bʊnt/ (cf. plural ''Bünde'' /ˈbʏndə/)
*''*gold'' "gold" > /gɔlt/
*''*halb'' "half" > /halp/ (cf. ''halbieren'' "to halve" /halˈbiːʁən/)
*''halbamtlich'' "semi-official" /ˈhalpʔamtlɪç/
*''*berg'' "mountain" /bɛɐ̯k/ (cf. plural ''Berge'' /ˈbɛɐ̯gə/)
*''*klug'' "clever, wise" > /kluːk/ (cf. fem. ''kluge'' /ˈkluːgə/)
There were, of course, also many cases of original voiceless stops in final position: ''Bett'' "bed", ''bunt'' "colorful", ''Stock'' "(walking) stick, cane". To sum up: there are the same number of structure points as before, /p t k b d g/, but there are more cases of /p t k/ than before and fewer of /b d g/, and there is a gap in the distribution of /b d g/ (they are never found in word-final position or before a compound boundary).
:Note 1: this split is easily recoverable by
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of co ...
because it results in alternations whose conditions are transparent. Thus ''Bund'' "bunch" (as in, keys) /bʊnt/ has a plural ''Bünde'' /ˈbʏndə/ in contrast to ''bunt'' "colorful" with /t/ in all environments (feminine /ˈbʊntə/, neuter /ˈbʊntəs/ and so on). In a
neutralizing
A neutralizing antibody (NAb) is an antibody that defends a cell from a pathogen or infectious particle by neutralizing any effect it has biologically. Neutralization renders the particle no longer infectious or pathogenic.
Neutralizing antibod ...
environment, such as a voiceless stop in word-final position, one cannot tell which of two possibilities was the original sound. The choice is resolved if the corresponding segment can be found in a non-neutralizing position, as when a suffix follows. Accordingly, a non-inflected form like ''und'' /ʔʊnt/ "and" is historically opaque (though as the spelling hints, the /t/ was originally *''d'').
:Note 2: unlike most phonological changes, this one became a "surface" rule in German, so loan-words whose source had a voiced stop in the devoicing environment are taken into German with a voiceless one instead: ''Klub'' "club" (association) /klʊp/ from English ''club.'' The same goes for truncated forms: Bub (for formal ''Bube'' "boy") is /buːp/.
::Note 2a: the surface alternation is what allows modern German orthography to write stops morphophonemically, thus ''Leib'' "loaf", ''Hand'' "hand", ''Weg'' "way", all with voiceless final stops in the simplex form and in compounds, but /b d g/ in inflected forms. In Old High and Middle High German, all voiceless stops were written as pronounced: ''hleip, hant, uuec'' and so on.
:Note 3: the same distribution holds for /s/ vs. /z/, but it arose by a completely different process, the voicing of original */s/ between vowels: *''mūs'' "mouse" > ''Maus'' /maʊs/, *''mūsīz'' "mice" (for earlier *''mūsiz'') > ''Mäuse'' /ˈmɔʏzə/. Original long (now short) ''ss'' does not voice medially, as in'' küssen'' "to kiss" /ˈkʏsen/, nor does /s/ from Proto-West-Germanic *''t'', as in ''Wasser'' "water" /ˈvasɐ/, ''Fässer'' "kegs" /ˈfɛsɐ/ plural of ''Fass'' /fas/ (= English ''vat''), müßig "idle" /ˈmyːsɪç/. German , as in ''Fisch'' "fish", reflects original *''sk'' (in native words) and does not become voiced in any environment: ''Fischer'' "fisherman" . (German has only in loanwords: ''Genie'' "genius", ''Gage'' "salary".)
Rhotacism in Latin
More typical of the aftermath of a conditioned merger is the famous case of
rhotacism
Rhotacism () or rhotacization is a sound change that converts one consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant: , , , or ) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment. The most common may be of to . When a dialect or member of a language ...
in Latin (also seen in some
Sabellian language spoken in the same area): Proto-Italic *''s'' > Latin /r/ between vowels: *''gesō'' "I do, act" > Lat. ''gerō'' (but perfect ''gessi'' < *''ges-s''- and participle ''gestus'' < *''ges-to''-, etc., with unchanged *''s'' in all other environments, even in the same paradigm).
This sound law is quite complete and regular, and in its immediate wake there were no examples of /s/ between vowels except for a few words with a special condition (''miser'' "wretched", ''caesariēs'' "bushy hair", ''diser''(''c'')''tus'' "eloquent": that is, rhotacism did not take place when an /r/ followed the *''s''). However, a new crop of /s/ between vowels soon arose from three sources. (1) a shortening of /ss/ after a diphthong or long vowel: ''causa'' "lawsuit" < *''kawssā'', ''cāsa'' "house' < *''kāssā'', ''fūsus'' "poured, melted" < *''χewssos''. (2)
univerbation In linguistics, univerbation is the diachronic process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.
The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax".
...
: ''nisi'' (''nisī'') "unless" < the phrase *''ne sei'', ''quasi'' (''quasī'') "as if" < the phrase *''kʷam sei''. (3) borrowings, such as ''rosa'' "rose" /rosa/, from a Sabellian source (the word is clearly somehow from Proto-Italic *''ruθ''- "red" but equally clearly not native Latin), and many words taken from or through Greek (''philosophia, basis, casia,'' ''Mesopotamia'', etc., etc.).
Nasal assimilation and "gn" in Latin
A particular example of a conditioned merger in Latin is the rule whereby
syllable-final stops
Stop may refer to:
Places
*Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States
* Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Facilities
* Bus stop
* Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck dri ...
, when followed by a
nasal consonant
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...
,
assimilated with it in nasality, while preserving their original point of articulation:
*''*supimos'' > *''supmos'' > ''
summus'' "highest"
*''*sabnyom'' > ''Samnium'' "Samnium" (a region in the southern Apennines)
*''*swepnos'' > ''
somnus
In Roman mythology, Somnus ("sleep") is the personification of sleep. His Greek counterpart is Hypnos. Somnus resided in the underworld. According to Virgil, Somnus was the brother of Death (Mors (mythology), Mors), and according to Ovid, Somnus ...
'' "sleep"
*''*atnos'' > ''
annus
A year or annus is the orbital period of a planetary body, for example, the Earth, moving in its orbit around the Sun. Due to the Earth's axial tilt, the course of a year sees the passing of the seasons, marked by change in weather, the hour ...
'' "year"
In some cases, the underlying (pre-assimilation) root can be retrieved from related lexical items in the language: e.g. ''superior'' "higher"; ''Sabīni'' "Samnites"; ''sopor'' "(deep) sleep". For some words, only comparative evidence can help retrieve the original consonant: for example, the etymology of ''annus'' “year” (as *''atnos'') is revealed by comparison with Gothic ''
aþna'' “year”.
According to this rule of nasal assimilation, the sequences *-g-n and *-k-n would become , with a
velar nasal
The voiced velar nasal, also known as agma, from the Greek word for 'fragment', is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''Englis ...
:
* *''dek-no''- > ''
dignus''
iŋnus"worthy"
* *''leg-no''- (*''
leǵ-'' "gather") > ''
lignum''
iŋnum"firewood"
* *''teg-no''- (*
''(s)teg''- "build") > ''
tignum''
iŋnum"timber"
* *''agʷnos'' > *''ag-nos'' > ''
agnus''
ŋnus"lamb"
The sound
was not a phoneme of Latin, but an
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
of /g/ before /n/.
The sequence was regularly rendered in the orthography as , gn, .
[While Roman grammarians generally make some fairly fine observations about Latin phonetics, they do not mention ''g'' = despite being thoroughly familiar with the idea from Greek orthography, where , γ, = before /k/ and /g/, as in ''agkúlos'' "bent" , ''ággellos'' "messenger" . This is likely to be a mere oversight.] Some epigraphic inscriptions also feature non-standard spellings, e.g. SINNU for ''
signum'' "sign, insigne", INGNEM for ''
ignem'' "fire". These are witness to the speakers' hesitancy on how to best transcribe the sound
in the sequence .
The regular nasal assimilation of Latin can be seen as a form of "merger", insofar as it resulted in the contrast between
oral stops (''p, b'', ''t, d'') and
nasal stop
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...
s (''m'', ''n'') being regularly
neutralized.
Concerning the number of contrasts
One of the traits of conditioned merger, as outlined above, is that the total number of contrasts remains the same, but it is possible for such splits to reduce the number of contrasts. It happens if all of the conditioned merger products merge with one or another phoneme.
For example, in Latin, the Pre-Latin phoneme *θ (from Proto-Italic *''tʰ'' < PIE *''dh'') disappears as such by merging with three other sounds: *''f'' (from PIE *''bh'' and *''gʷh''), *''d'', and *''b:''
Initially *θ >'' f:''
*PItal. *''tʰi-n-kʰ''- "model, shape" > *''θi-n-χ''- > Lat. ''fingō'' (PIE root *''dheyǵh''- "smear, work with the hands"; cf. Sanskrit ''dihanti'' "they smear", Avestan'' daēza''- "wall" = Greek ''teîkhos;'' English ''dough'' < OE ''dāh'' besides ''dāg'' < PIE *''dhoyǵh''-)
*PItal. *''tʰwor''- "door" > *''θwor''- > Lat. ''forēs'' "door" (PIE *''dhwor''-; like most reflexes plural only; cf Eng. ''door'' < *''dhur''-, Greek ''thúrā'' (probably < *''dhwor''-) usually ''thúrai'' pl.)
::Cf. Latin ferō "carry" < Proto-Italic *pʰer- < PIE *bher-; Latin frāter "brother" < Proto-Italic *pʰrātēr < PIE *bhre-H₂ter-
Medially adjacent to *''l, *r'', or *''u,'' *θ becomes ''b:''
*PItal. *''wertʰom'' "word" > *''werθom'' > *''werðom'' (? *''werβom'') > Lat. ''verbum'' (cf. English ''word'' < *''wurdaⁿ'' < PIE *''wṛdhom'', Lithuanian ''vaṙdas'' "name")
*PItal. *''rutʰros'' "red" > *''ruθros'' > *''ruðros'' (? *''ruβros'') > Latin ''ruber'' (via *''rubers'' < *''rubrs'' < *''rubros''), cf. ''rubra'' fem. ''rubrum'' neut.
*PItal. *-''tʰlo-/*-tʰlā''- "tool suffix" > Latin -''bulum, -bula:'' PIE *''peH₂-dhlo''- "nourishment" > PItal. *''pā-tʰlo''- > *''pāθlo''- > Latin ''pābulum;'' PIE *''suH-dhleH₂''- "sewing implement" > PItal. *''sūtʰlā'' > *''sūθlā'' > Latin ''sūbula'' "cobbler's awl"
::Intervocalic Latin -''b''- is from PIE *''bh'', *''s'', and (rarely and problematically) *''b:'' Lat. ''ambō'' "both" < PIE *''ambh''- or *''H₂embh''- (cf. Greek ''amphi''-); Lat. ''crābrō'' "hornet" < ''*ḱṛHs-ron''- (cf. Vedic ''śīrṣn''- "hornet"); Lat. ''cannabis'' "hemp" (cf. Old English ''hænep'' "hemp"). The change of *-''sr''- to -''br''- is itself presumably via *-''θr- > *-ðr- > *-βr''-.
Elsewhere, *θ becomes d:
*PItal. *''metʰyo''- "middle" > *''meθyo''- > Pre-Lat. *''meðyo''- > Lat. ''medius'' (three syllables; PIE *''medhyo''-, cf. Sanskrit ''madhya''-, Greek ''més''(''s'')''os'' < *''meth-yo''-)
*PItal. *''pʰeytʰ''- > *''feyθ''- > *''feyð''- > Lat. ''fīdus'' "trusting" (cf. Greek ''peíthomai'' "am persuaded", English ''bid'' "order, ask")
::Intervocalic -''d''- in Latin comes from PIE *''d'' in ''ped''- "foot", ''sīdere'' "to sit down", ''cord''- "heart"
There is no alternation to give away the historical story, there, via
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of co ...
; the evidence for these changes is almost entirely from comparative reconstruction. That reconstruction makes it easy to unriddle the story behind the weird forms of the Latin paradigm ''jubeō'' "order",'' jussī'' perfect, ''jussus'' participle. If the root is inherited, it would have to have been PIE *''yewdh-''.
Unconditioned merger
Unconditioned merger, that is, complete loss of a contrast between two or more phonemes, is not very common. Most mergers are conditioned. That is, most apparent mergers of A and B have an environment or two in which A did something else, such as drop or merge with C.
Typical is the unconditioned merger seen in the Celtic conflation of the PIE plain voiced series of stops with the breathy-voiced series: *''bh, *dh, *ǵh, *gh'' are indistinguishable in Celtic etymology from the reflexes of *''b *d *ǵ *g''. The collapse of the contrast cannot be stated in whole-series terms because the labiovelars do not co-operate. PIE *''gʷ'' everywhere falls together with the reflexes of *''b'' and *''bh'' as Proto-Celtic *''b'', but *''gʷh'' seems to have become PCelt. *''gʷ'', lining up with PCelt. *''kʷ'' < PIE *''kʷ''.
Examples
*OE'' y'' and'' ý'' (short and long high front rounded vowels) fell together with ''i'' and'' í'' via a simple phonetic unrounding: OE'' hypp, cynn, cyssan, brycg, fyllan, fýr, mýs, brýd'' became modern ''hip, kin, kiss, bridge, fill, fire, mice, bride''. There is no way to tell by inspection whether a modern /i ay/ goes back to a rounded or an unrounded vowel. The change is not even reflected in modern spelling since it took place too early to be captured in Middle English Spelling conventions. Of course, current spellings like ''type, thyme, psyche'', etc., have nothing to do with OE ''y'' = /y/.
*There is a massive, consistent body of evidence that PIE *''l'' and *''r'' merged totally in Proto-Indo-Iranian, as did PIE *''e *o *a'' into Proto-Indo-Iranian *''a''.
*The evolution of Romance shows a systematic collection of unconditioned mergers in connection with the loss of Latin vowel length. Latin had ten vowels, five long and five short (i, ī; e, ē; a, ā; and so on). In the variety of Romance underlying Sardo and some other dialects of the islands, the ten vowels simply fell together pairwise: in no way are Latin ''e, ē'', say, reflected differently. In Proto-Western-Romance, the ancestor of French, Iberian, Italian north of the Spezia-Rimini line, etc., however, things happened differently: Latin /a ā/ merged totally, as in Sardo, but the other vowels all behaved differently. Upon losing the feature of length, Latin /ī ū/ merged with nothing, but the ''short'' high vowels, front and back, merged with the ''long mid'' vowels: thus, Latin /i ē/ are uniformly reflected as PWRom. *''ẹ'' (in the standard Romance notation), and /u ō/ become *''ọ''. PWRom. *''ẹ'' is reflected in French (in open syllables) as /wa/ (spelled ''oi''); ''voile'' "sail", ''foin'' "hay", ''doigt'' "finger", ''quoi'' "what", are from Latin ''vēlum, fēnum, digitus ''(via'' *dictu), quid'', respectively. There is no way of telling in French which one of the two Latin vowels is the source of any given /wa/.
Another example is provided by
Japonic languages
Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...
.
Proto-Japanese
Proto-Japonic or Proto-Japanese–Ryukyuan is the reconstructed language ancestral to the Japonic language family.
It has been reconstructed by using a combination of internal reconstruction from Old Japanese and by applying the comparative meth ...
had 8 vowels; it has been reduced to 5 in modern
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, but in
Yaeyama, the vowel mergers progressed further, to 3 vowels.
Split
In a split (Hoenigswald's "secondary split"), a new contrast arises when allophones of a phoneme cease being in complementary distribution and are therefore necessarily independent structure points, i.e. contrastive.
This mostly comes about because of some loss of distinctiveness in the environment of one or more allophones of a phoneme.
A simple example is the rise of the contrast between nasal and oral vowels in French. A full account of this history is complicated by the subsequent changes in the phonetics of the nasal vowels, but the development can be compendiously illustrated via the present-day French phonemes /a/ and /ã/:
*Step 1: *''a'' > *''ã'' when a nasal immediately follows: *''čantu'' "song" > (still phonemically );
*Step 2: at some point in the history of French when speakers consistently stopped making an oral closure with the tongue, we had , that is (if not ) and finally, with the loss of the final stop, modern French ''chant'' "song", distinct from French ''chat'' "cat" solely by the contrast between the nasal and the oral articulation of the vowels, and thus with many other forms in which /a/ and contrast.
::Note 1: the nasalization of a vowel before a nasal is found very widely in the world's languages, but is not at all universal. In modern French, for example, vowels before a nasal are oral. That they used to be nasalized, like the vowels before lost nasals, is indicated by certain phonetic changes not always reflected in the orthography: Fr. ''femme'' "woman" /fam/ (with the lowering of (nasalized ) to *''ã'' prior to denasalization).
::Note 2: unusually for a split, the history of the French innovation, even including some changes in vowel cavity features, can be readily inferred by
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of co ...
. This is because the contrastive feature
asalin a vowel system usually has a nasal in its history, which makes for straightforward surmises. There are also clear alternations, as "good" (masc.) vs. (fem.), while such pairs as /fin/ "fine" (fem.) and (masc.) together with derivatives like ''raffiné'' /rafine/ "refined" indicate what happened to nasalized *''i''.
Phonemic split was a major factor in the creation of the contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives in English. Originally, to oversimplify a bit, Old English fricatives were voiced between voiced sounds and voiceless elsewhere. Thus /f/ was
in ''fisc'' "fish", ''fyllen'' "to fill"
yllen ''hæft'' "prisoner", ''ofþyrsted''
fθyrsted"athirst", ''líf'' "life", ''wulf'' "wolf". But in say the dative singular of "life", that is ''lífe'', the form was
i:ve(as in English ''alive'', being an old prepositional phrase ''on lífe''); the plural of ''wulf, wulfas'', was
ulvas as still seen in'' wolves''. The voiced fricative is typically seen in verbs, too (often with variations in vowel length of diverse sources): ''gift'' but ''give'', ''shelf'' but ''shelve''. Such alternations are to be seen even in loan words, as ''proof'' vs ''prove'' (though not as a rule in borrowed plurals, thus ''proofs, uses'', with voiceless fricatives).
:Note 1: unlike the French example, there is no chance of recovering the historical source of the alternations in English between /s θ f/ and /z ð v/ merely through inspection of the modern forms. The conditioning factor (original location of the voiced alternants between vowels, for example) is quite lost and with little reason to even suspect the original state of affairs; and anyway the original distributions have been much disturbed by analogical leveling. ''Worthy'' and (in some dialects) ''greasy'' have voiced fricative (next to the voiceless ones in ''worth'' and'' grease'') but adjectives in -''y'' otherwise do not alternate: ''bossy, glassy, leafy, earthy, breathy, saucy'', etc (cf. ''glaze, leaves, breathe'', and note that even in dialects with /z/ in'' greasy'', the verb ''to grease'' always has /s/).
:Note 2: the phoneme does not alternate with (and never did). In native words, is from *''sk'', and either the change of this sequence to postdated the rearranging of voicing in pre-Old English fricatives, or else it was phonetically long between vowels, originally, much like the of present-day Italian (''pesce'' "fish" is phonetically ) and long fricatives, just like sequences of fricatives, were always voiceless in Old English, as in ''cyssan'' "to kiss". The Early Modern English development of < */sj/, as in ''nation, mission, assure'', vastly postdated the period when fricatives became voiced between vowels.
:Note 3: a common misstatement of cases like OE /f/ > Modern English /f, v/ is that a "new phoneme" has been created. Not so. A new contrast has been created. Both NE /f/ and /v/ are new phonemes, differing in phonetic specifications and distribution from OE /f/. Without doubt, one component in this misunderstanding is the orthography. If, instead of speaking of the development of Old English /f/ we said that OE split into /f/ and /v/, there would presumably be less confused talk of "a" new phoneme arising in the process.
Loss
In Hoenigswald's original scheme, loss, the disappearance of a segment, or even of a whole phoneme, was treated as a form of merger, depending on whether the loss was conditioned or unconditioned. The "element" that a vanished segment or phoneme merged with was "
zero
0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation
Positional notation (or place-value notation, or positional numeral system) usually denotes the extension to any base of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (or ...
".
The situation in which a highly inflected language has formations without any affix at all (Latin ''alter'' "(the) other", for example) is quite common, but it is the only one (nominative singular masculine: ''altera'' nominative singular feminine, ''alterum'' accusative singular masculine, etc.) of the 30 forms that make up the paradigm that is not explicitly marked with endings for gender, number, and case.
From a historical perspective, there is no problem since ''alter'' is from *''alteros'' (overtly nominative singular and masculine), with the regular loss of the short vowel after *-''r''- and the truncation of the resulting word-final cluster *-''rs''. Descriptively, however, it is problematic to say that the "nominative singular masculine" is signaled by the absence of any affix. It is simpler to view ''alter'' as more than what it looks like, /alterØ/, "marked" for case, number, and gender by an affix, like the other 29 forms in the paradigm. It is merely that the "marker" in question is not a phoneme or sequence of phonemes but the element /Ø/.
Along the way, it is hard to know when to stop positing zeros and whether to regard one zero as different from another. For example, if the zero not-marking ''can'' (as in ''he can'') as "third person singular" is the same zero that not-marks ''deer'' as "plural", or if are both basically a single morphological placeholder. If it is determined that there is a zero on the end of ''deer'' in ''three deer'', it is uncertain whether English adjectives agree with the number of the noun they modify, using the same zero affix. (Deictics do so: compare ''this deer, these deer''.) In some theories of syntax it is useful to have an overt marker on a singular noun in a sentence such as ''My head hurts'' because the syntactic mechanism needs something explicit to generate the singular suffix on the verb. Thus, all English singular nouns may be marked with yet another zero.
It seems possible to avoid all those issues by considering loss as a separate basic category of phonological change, and leave zero out of it.
As stated above, one can regard loss as both a kind of conditioned merger (when only some expressions of a phoneme are lost) and a disappearance of a whole structure point. The former is much more common than the latter.
*In Latin are many consonant clusters that lose a member or two such as these: ''tostus'' "toasted, dried" < *''torstos'', ''multrum'' "milking stool" < *''molktrom'', ''scultus'' "carved" < *''scolptos'', ''cēna'' "dinner" < *''kertsnā'', ''lūna'' "moon" < *''louwksnā'' ("lantern" or the like).
*Greek lost all stops from the end of a word (so *''kʷit'' "what" > Greek ''ti'', *''deḱṃt'' "ten" > ''déka'', *''wanakt'' "O prince" >'' ána''), but stops generally survive elsewhere. PIE *''s'' drops medially between voiced sounds in Greek but is preserved in final position and in some consonant clusters.
*Old English
(
voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loc ...
) is everywhere lost as such, but usually leaves traces behind (
transphonologization
In historical linguistics, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see below) is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contrast ...
). In ''furh'' "furrow" and ''mearh'' "marrow", it vocalizes. It is elided (with varying effects on the preceding vowel, such as lengthening) in ''night, knight, might, taught, naught, freight, fought, plow'' (Brit. plough, OE ''plōh''), ''bought, through, though, slaughter;'' but /f/ in ''laugh, trough, tough, enough'' (and ''daughter'' can be found in ''The Pilgrim's Progress'' rhyming with ''after'', and the spelling ''dafter'' is actually attested) The /x/ phoneme still exists in some onomatopoeiac words, like "ugh" (note the spelling uses ''gh'', which indicates that when they were coined, there was still some understanding of the phonemic meaning of ''gh''), "yech" and "chutzpah".
*/g k/ are lost in English in word-initial position before /n/: ''gnaw, gnat, knight, know''. /t/ is lost after fricatives before nasals and /l/: ''soften, castle, bristle, chestnut, Christmas, hasten''
*In many words, /f/ (that is, Old English
was lost between vowels: ''auger, hawk, newt'' < OE ''nafogar, hafoc, efete'' ("lizard"), and in some alternative (poetic) forms: ''e'en'' "evening", ''o'er'' "over", ''e'er'' "ever"; Scottish ''siller'' "silver", and others.
The ends of words often have sound laws that apply there only, and many such special developments consist of the loss of a segment. The early history and prehistory of English has seen several waves of loss of elements, vowels and consonants alike, from the ends of words, first in Proto-Germanic, then to Proto-West-Germanic, then to Old and Middle and Modern English, shedding bits from the ends of words at every step of the way. There is in Modern English next to nothing left of the elaborate inflectional and derivational apparatus of PIE or of Proto-Germanic because of the successive ablation of the phonemes making up these suffixes.
Total unconditional loss is, as mentioned, not very common. Latin /h/ appears to have been lost everywhere in all varieties of Proto-Romance except Romanian. Proto-Indo-European laryngeals survived as consonants only in
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.
...
but left plenty of traces of their former presence (see
laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that:
* The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had a series of phonemes beyond those reconstructable by the comparative method. That is, the ...
).
Phonemic differentiation
Phonemic differentiation is the phenomenon of a
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
maximizing the acoustic distance between its
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s.
Examples
For example, in many languages, including
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
, most
front vowel
A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherw ...
s are
unrounded
In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel. When a ''rounded'' vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, and ''unrounded'' vowels are pro ...
, while most
back vowel
A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s are rounded. There are no languages in which all front vowels are rounded and all back vowels are unrounded. The most likely explanation for this is that front vowels have a higher second
formant
In speech science and phonetics, a formant is the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. In acoustics, a formant is usually defined as a broad peak, or local maximum, in the spectrum. For harmoni ...
(F2) than back vowels, and unrounded vowels have a higher F2 than rounded vowels. Thus unrounded front vowels and rounded back vowels have maximally different F2s, enhancing their phonemic differentiation.
Phonemic differentiation can have an effect on
diachronic
Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A ''synchronic'' approach (from grc, συν- "together" and "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic l ...
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
. In
chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
s, phonemic differentiation is maintained, while in phonemic mergers it is lost. Phonemic splits involve the creation of two phonemes out of one, which then tend to diverge because of phonemic differentiation.
Chain shifts
In a
chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
, one phoneme moves in acoustic space, causing other phonemes to move as well to maintain optimal phonemic differentiation. An example from
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
is the
Northern cities vowel shift
Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of U ...
br>
where the
Phonological history of English short A#æ-tensing, raising of has triggered a fronting of , which in turn has triggered a lowering of , and so forth.
Phonemic mergers
If a phoneme moves in acoustic space, but its neighbors do not move in a chain shift, a ''phonemic merger'' may occur. In that case, a single phoneme results where an earlier stage of the language had two phonemes (that is also called ''
phonetic neutralization''). A well known example of a phonemic merger in American English is the
cot–caught merger
The ''cot''–''caught'' merger or merger, formally known in linguistics as the low back merger, is a sound change present in some dialects of English where speakers do not distinguish the vowel phonemes in "cot" and "caught". "Cot" and "caugh ...
by which the vowel phonemes
and
(illustrated by the words ''cot'' and ''caught'' respectively) have merged into a single phoneme in some
accents Accent may refer to:
Speech and language
* Accent (sociolinguistics), way of pronunciation particular to a speaker or group of speakers
* Accent (phonetics), prominence given to a particular syllable in a word, or a word in a phrase
** Pitch acce ...
.
Phonemic splits
In a phonemic split, a phoneme at an earlier stage of the language is divided into two phonemes over time. Usually, it happens when a phoneme has two
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
s appearing in different environments, but
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
eliminates the distinction between the two environments. For example, in
umlaut in the
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
, the
back vowel
A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s originally had front rounded allophones before the vowel in a following syllable. When sound change caused the syllables containing to be lost, a phonemic split resulted, making distinct phonemes.
It is sometimes difficult to determine whether a split or a merger has happened if one dialect has two phonemes corresponding to a single phoneme in another dialect;
diachronic
Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A ''synchronic'' approach (from grc, συν- "together" and "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic l ...
research is usually required to determine the dialect that is conservative and the one that is innovative.
When phonemic change occurs differently in the
standard language
A standard language (also standard variety, standard dialect, and standard) is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage, although occasionally the term refers to the entirety of a language that includes ...
and in dialects, the dialect pronunciation is considered nonstandard and may be stigmatized. In
descriptive linguistics
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013).
All acad ...
, however, the question of which splits and mergers are prestigious and which are stigmatized is irrelevant. However, such stigmatization can lead to
hypercorrection
In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a mi ...
, when the dialect speakers attempt to imitate the standard language but overshoot, as with the
foot–strut split
Most dialects of modern English have two close back vowels: the near-close near-back rounded vowel found in words like ''foot'', and the close back rounded vowel (realized as central in many dialects) found in words like ''goose''. The vowe ...
, where failing to make the split is stigmatized in Northern England, and speakers of non-splitting accents often try to introduce it into their speech, sometimes resulting in hypercorrections such as pronouncing ''pudding'' .
Occasionally, speakers of one accent may believe the speakers of another accent to have undergone a merger, when there has really been a
chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
.
See also
*
Chain shift
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
*
Drift (linguistics)
Two types of language change can be characterized as linguistic drift: a unidirectional short-term and cyclic long-term drift.
Short-term unidirectional drift
According to Sapir, drift is the unconscious change in natural language. He gives the ...
*
Language change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify ...
*
Phonological history of English consonants
This article describes those aspects of the phonological history of the English language which concern consonants.
Consonant clusters
H-cluster reductions
* Reduction of /hw/ – to /h/ in a few words (such as ''who''), but usually to , for t ...
*
Phonological history of English vowels
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
*
Phonological history of the English language
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
*
Sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
*
Vowel shift
A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language.
The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century. The Greek language also underwent a vowe ...
Index Diachronica
References
Notes
Sources
#Hale, M. (2007), Historical linguistics: Theory and method, Oxford, Blackwell
"> ">/sup>
#Hale, M., Kissock, M., & Reiss, C. (2014) An I-Language Approach to Phonologization and Lexification. Chapter 20. ''The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology.'' Edited by Patrick Honeybone and Joseph Salmons
#Hoenigswald, H. (1965). Language change and linguistic reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Phonological Change
Historical linguistics
Phonology
Splits and mergers in English phonology
Homonymy