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Inhistorical linguistics,phonological change is anysound change that alters the distribution ofphonemes 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.[1] 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).[1] One process of phonological change isrephonemicization, in which the distribution of phonemes changes by either addition of new phonemes or a reorganization of existing phonemes.[2] Mergers and splits are types of rephonemicization and are discussed further below.
In a typological scheme first systematized byHenry M. Hoenigswald in 1965, a historicalsound law can only affect a phonological system in one of three ways:
This classification does not consider mere changes in pronunciation, that is, phonetic change, evenchain shifts, in which neither the number nor the distribution of phonemes is affected.
Phonetic change can occur without any modification to the phoneme inventory or phonemic correspondences. This change is purelyallophonic 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.[2]
For the most part, phonetic changes are examples ofallophonic differentiation or assimilation; i.e., sounds in specific environments acquire new phonetic features or perhaps lose phonetic features they originally had. For example, thedevoicing of the vowels/i/ and/ɯ/ in certain environments inJapanese, thenasalization ofvowels beforenasals (common but not universal), changes inpoint of articulation ofstops 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 shifts such as theGreat Vowel Shift (in which nearly all of the vowels of the English language changed) or the allophonic differentiation of /s/, originally*[s], into[szʃʒʂʐθχχʷh], do not qualify as phonological change as long as all of thephones remain in complementary distribution.
Many phonetic changes provide the raw ingredients for later phonemic innovations. InProto-Italic, for example, intervocalic */s/ became *[z]. It was a phonetic change, merely a mild and superficial complication in the phonological system, but when *[z] merged with */r/, the effect on the phonological system was greater. (The example will be discussed below, underconditioned merger.)
Similarly, in the prehistory ofIndo-Iranian, thevelars */k/ and */g/ acquired distinctivelypalatal articulation before front vowels (*/e/, */i/, */ē/ */ī/), so that*/ke/ came to be pronounced*[t͡ʃe] and*/ge/ *[d͡ʒe], but the phones*[t͡ʃ] and*[d͡ʒ] 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 acquired "new" /ki/ and /gi/ sequences viaanalogy and borrowing, and likewise /ču/,/ǰu/, /čm/, and similar novelties; and the reduction of thediphthong */ay/ to Sanskrit /ē/ had no effect at all on preceding velar stops.
Phonemicmerger is a loss of distinction between phonemes. Occasionally, the termreduction refers to phonemic merger. It is not to be confused with the meaning of the word "reduction" in phonetics, such asvowel reduction, but phonetic changes may contribute to phonemic mergers. For example, in mostNorth American English dialects, the vowel in the wordlot and vowel in the wordpalm have become the same sound and thusundergone a merger. In mostdialects of England, the wordsfather andfarther arepronounced the same due to a merger created bynon-rhoticity or "R-dropping".
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:
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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).
A trivial (if all-pervasive) example of conditioned merger is thedevoicing of voiced stops in German when in word-final position or immediately before a compound boundary (see:Help:IPA/Standard German):
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).
More typical of the aftermath of a conditioned merger is the famous case ofrhotacism in Latin (also seen in someSabellian language spoken in the same area): Proto-Italic *s > Latin /r/ between vowels: *gesō "I do, act" > Lat.gerō (but perfectgessi < *ges-s- and participlegestus < *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:nisi (nisī) "unless" < the phrase *ne sei,quasi (quasī) "as if" < the phrase *kʷam sei. (3) borrowings, such asrosa "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.).
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A particular example of a conditioned merger in Latin is the rule wherebysyllable-finalstops, when followed by anasal consonant,assimilated with it in nasality, while preserving their original point of articulation:
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 ofannus "year" (as *atnos) is revealed by comparison with Gothicaþna "year".
According to this rule of nasal assimilation, the sequences *-g-n and *-k-n would become[ŋn], with avelar nasal[ŋ]:
The sound [ŋ] was not a phoneme of Latin, but anallophone of /g/ before /n/.
The sequence[ŋn] was regularly rendered in the orthography as |gn|.[4] Some epigraphic inscriptions also feature non-standard spellings, e.g. SINNU forsignum "sign, insigne", INGNEM forignem "fire". These are witness to the speakers' hesitancy on how to best transcribe the sound [ŋ] in the sequence[ŋn].
The regular nasal assimilation of Latin can be seen as a form of "merger", insofar as it resulted in the contrast betweenoral stops (p, b,t, d) andnasal stops (m,n) being regularlyneutralized.
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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 toreduce 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:
Medially adjacent to *l, *r, or *u, *θ becomesb:
Elsewhere, *θ becomes d:
There is no alternation to give away the historical story, there, viainternal reconstruction; 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 paradigmjubeō "order", jussī perfect,jussus participle. If the root is inherited, it would have to have been PIE *yewdh-.
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.[citation needed]
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.
Another example is provided byJaponic languages.Old Japanese had 8 vowels; it has been reduced to 5 in modernJapanese.
In a split (Hoenigswald's "secondary split"), anew 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/:
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 [f] infisc[fiʃ] "fish",fyllen "to fill" [fyllen],hæft "prisoner",ofþyrsted [ofθyrsted] "athirst",líf "life",wulf "wolf". But in say the dative singular of "life", that islífe, the form was [li:ve] (as in Englishalive, being an old prepositional phraseon lífe); the plural ofwulf, wulfas, was [wulvas], as still seen in wolves. The voiced fricative is typically seen in verbs, too (often with variations in vowel length of diverse sources):gift butgive,shelf butshelve. Such alternations are to be seen even in loan words, asproof vsprove (though not as a rule in borrowed plurals, thusproofs, uses, with voiceless fricatives).
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".
The situation in which a highly inflected language has formations without any affix at all (Latinalter "(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 sincealter 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 viewalter 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-markingcan (as inhe can) as "third person singular" is the same zero that not-marksdeer as "plural", or if are both basically a single morphological placeholder. If it is determined that there is a zero on the end ofdeer inthree deer, it is uncertain whether English adjectives agree with the number of the noun they modify, using the same zero affix. (Deictics do so: comparethis deer, these deer.) In some theories of syntax it is useful to have an overt marker on a singular noun in a sentence such asMy 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.
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 inAnatolian languages but left plenty of traces of their former presence (seelaryngeal theory).
Phonemic differentiation is the phenomenon of alanguage maximizing the acoustic distance between itsphonemes.
For example, in many languages, includingEnglish, mostfront vowels areunrounded, while mostback vowels 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[citation needed] is that front vowels have a higher secondformant (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 ondiachronicsound change. Inchain shifts, 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.
In achain shift, one phoneme moves in acoustic space, causing other phonemes to move as well to maintain optimal phonemic differentiation. An example fromAmerican English is theNorthern cities vowel shift[1], where theraising of/æ/ has triggered a fronting of/ɑ/, which in turn has triggered a lowering of/ɔ/, and so forth.
If a phoneme moves in acoustic space, but its neighbors do not move in a chain shift, aphonemic merger may occur. In that case, a single phoneme results where an earlier stage of the language had two phonemes (that is also calledphonetic neutralization). A well known example of a phonemic merger in American English is thecot–caught merger by which the vowel phonemes/ɑ/ and/ɔ/ (illustrated by the wordscot andcaught respectively) have merged into a single phoneme in someaccents.
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 twoallophones appearing in different environments, butsound change eliminates the distinction between the two environments. For example, inumlaut in theGermanic languages, theback vowels/u,o/ originally had front rounded allophones[y,ø] before the vowel/i/ in a following syllable. When sound change caused the syllables containing/i/ to be lost, a phonemic split resulted, making/y,ø/ 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 research is usually required to determine the dialect that is conservative and the one that is innovative.
When phonemic change occurs differently in thestandard language and in dialects, the dialect pronunciation is considered nonstandard and may be stigmatized. Indescriptive linguistics, however, the question of which splits and mergers are prestigious and which are stigmatized is irrelevant. However, such stigmatization can lead tohypercorrection, when the dialect speakers attempt to imitate the standard language but overshoot, as with thefoot–strut split, 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 pronouncingpudding/pʌdɪŋ/.
Occasionally, speakers of one accent may believe the speakers of another accent to have undergone a merger, when there has really been achain shift.
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