Inhistorical linguistics,transphonologisation (also known asrephonologisation orcheshirisation, seebelow) is a type ofsound change whereby aphonemic contrast that used to involve a certainfeature X evolves in such a way that the contrast is preserved, yet becomes associated with a different feature Y.
For example, a language contrasting two words */sat/ vs. */san/ may evolve historically so that finalconsonants are dropped, yet the modern language preserves the contrast through the nature of thevowel, as in a pair/sa/ vs./sã/. Such a situation would be described by saying that a former contrast betweenoral andnasal consonants has beentransphonologised into a contrast betweenoral and nasal vowels.
The termtransphonologisation was coined byAndré-Georges Haudricourt.[1] The concept was defined and amply illustrated by Hagège & Haudricourt;[2] it has been mentioned by several followers ofpanchronic phonology,[3] and beyond.[4]
A common example of transphonologisation isumlaut.
Germanic
In manyGermanic languages around 500–700 AD, a sound change fronted a back vowel when an/i/ or/j/ followed in the next syllable. Typically, the/i/ or/j/ was then lost, leading to a situation where a trace of the original/i/ or/j/ remains in the fronted quality of the preceding vowel. Alternatively, a distinction formerly expressed through the presence or absence of an/i/ or/j/ suffix was then re-expressed as a distinction between a front or back vowel.
As a specific instance of this, in prehistoricOld English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an/i/ suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like/muːs/ "mouse", for example, had a plural/muːsi/ "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced[myːsi], where the long back vowel/uː/ was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel[yː], which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final/i/, however, made/yː/ aphoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between/muːs/ "mouse" and/myːs/ "mice". In this case, the lost sound/i/ left a trace in the presence of/yː/; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix/i/, has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front–back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse"/maʊs/ and "mice"/maɪs/, although the specifics have been modified by theGreat Vowel Shift.
Outside Germanic
Similar phenomena have been described in languages outside Germanic.
SeventeenAustronesian languages of northern Vanuatu[5] have gone through a process whereby former *CVCVdisyllables lost their final vowel, yet preserved their contrast through the creation of new vowels: e.g.Proto-Oceanic *paRi "stingray" and *paRu "hibiscus" transphonologised to/βɛr/ and/βɔr/ inMwesen.[6] This resulted in the expansion of vowel inventories in the region, from an original five-vowel system (*a *e *i *o *u) to inventories ranging from 7 to 16 vowels (depending on the language).
In French, a final/n/ sound disappeared, but left its trace in thenasalisation of thepreceding vowel, as invin blanc[vɛ̃blɑ̃], from historical[vinblaŋk].
In many languages (Sino-Tibetan,Austroasiatic,Oceanic,Celtic…), a vowel was nasalised by the nasal consonant preceding it: this "historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel" is a case of transphonologization.[7]
InAmerican English, the wordsrider andwriter are pronounced with a[ɾ] instead of[t] and[d] as a result offlapping. The distinction between the two words can, however, be preserved by (or transferred to) the length of the vowel (or in this case, diphthong), as vowels are pronounced longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants. Also, the quality of the vowels may be affected.
Before disappearing, a sound may trigger or prevent some phonetic change in its vicinity that would not otherwise have occurred, and which may remain long afterward. For example:
In theEnglish wordnight, the/x/ sound (spelledgh) disappeared, but before, or perhaps as it did so (see "compensatory lengthening"), it lengthened the vowel⟨i⟩, so that the word is pronounced/ˈnaɪt/ "nite" rather than the/ˈnɪt/ "nit" that would otherwise be expected for aclosed syllable.
inHejazi Arabic's direct object pronoun, the/h/ ـُه sound at the end of words has disappeared, so that the contrast in the Classical Arabicقالوه/qaː.luːh/ (they said it) andقالوا/qaː.luː/ (they said) became a contrast only between the vowels asقالوه/ɡaː.loː/ (they said it) andقالوا/ɡaː.lu/ (they said).
The existence ofcontrastive tone in modern languages often originates in transphonologization of earlier contrasts between consonants: e.g. a former contrast of consonant voicing (*/pa/ vs. */ba/) transphonologizes to a tonal contrast (*/pa˥/ vs. */pa˩/)
InMakassarese andBerau,Proto-Malayo-Polynesian schwa phoneme*ə geminates the following consonant but merges toa (Makassarese*bəli →*bəlli →balli "to buy, price", compare Indonesianbeli).
Rephonologisation was a term used byRoman Jakobson (1931 [1972]) to refer to essentially the same process but failed to catch on because of its ambiguity. In a 1994 paper,Norman (1994) used it again in the context of a proposedOld Chinese sound change that transferred a distinction formerly expressed through putativepharyngealization of the initial consonant of a syllable to one expressed through presence or absence of a palatal glide/j/ before the main vowel of the syllable.[8] However,rephonologization is occasionally used with another meaning,[9] referring to changes such as theGermanic sound shift or the Slavic change from/ɡ/ to/ɦ/, where the phonological relationships among sounds change but the number of phonemes stays the same. That can be viewed as a special case of the broader process being described here.
James Matisoff (1991:443) coinedcheshirisation as a synonym for transphonologisation. The term jokingly refers to theCheshire Cat, a character in the bookAlice in Wonderland, who "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone".[10]Cheshirisation has been used by some other authors (e.g.John McWhorter in McWhorter 2005, andHilary Chappell in Chappell 2006).
^Norman, Jerry (July–September 1994). "Pharyngealisation in Early Chinese".Journal of the American Oriental Society.114 (3):397–408.doi:10.2307/605083.JSTOR605083. Specifically, the glide/j/ occurred whenever the initial consonant wasnot pharyngealized.
^Trask, R. L. (1995).A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge.ISBN978-0-415-11261-1.
Haudricourt, André-Georges (1965). "Les Mutations Consonantiques des Occlusives Initiales en Môn-khmer".Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris.60 (1):160–172.
Haudricourt, André-Georges (1970), "Les doubles transphonologisations simultanées",Actele celui de-al XII-lea Congres international de Lingvistica si Filologie romanica, Bucuresti: Ed. Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, pp. 315–317
Hyman, Larry M. (2013), "Enlarging the scope of phonologization", in Yu, Alan C.L. (ed.),Origins of sound change: Approaches to phonologization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–28,ISBN9780199573745
Jakobson, Roman (1972) [1931], "Principles of historical phonology", in Keiler, A.R. (ed.),A Reader in Historical and Comparative Linguistics, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 121–38
Kirby, James (2013), "The role of probabilistic enhancement in phonologization", in Yu, Alan C.L. (ed.),Origins of sound change: Approaches to phonologization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 228–246,ISBN9780199573745
Matisoff, James, 1991, "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." InApproaches to grammaticalization, Traugott & Heine, eds. John Benjamins, pp. 383–453.
Mazaudon, Martine; Lowe, John B. (1993),"Regularity and exceptions in sound change",Annual Conference of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, Bruxelles: Linguistic Society of Belgium, pp. 1–26
