Sound Change
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Joseph Salmons
Welcome to the companion for Sound Change by Joseph Salmons. Here you will
find additional material to be used together with the book. Suggestions for addi-
tions or changes can be sent to [email protected].
Created: September 2020, with much help from Sarah Holmstrom
Preface
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Beyond this book
At the end of each chapter of the printed book you’ll find a section called
‘Beyond this book.’ Those sections are reprinted here with some development
and expansion. After this one – it’s for the preface, after all – they have three
sections, one on looking at more data, one on learning a little more from the spe-
cialist literature and one to get you thinking about possible original research on
sound change. I’ll sometimes suggest specific readings but we’re now at a point
where I simply assume readers will be able to easily find relevant work using web
searches, especially those that focus on published scholarship. I’ll add more at
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com and invite contributions.
Two suggestions to get you started:
First, get a couple of textbooks or handbooks on historical linguistics and look
at the chapter(s) on sound change. Compare the topics and examples and basic
line of argument there to the table of contents of this book. Where and how do
they differ?
Possible books to draw on. These represent a wide range of views and only
a fraction of what’s out there and there are good sources not included here. I’ve
limited things to English texts, but works in other languages obviously provide
particularly valuable contrasts and comparisons, empirically and theoretically.
Anttila, Raimo (1989), Historical and Comparative Linguistics, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Auer, Peter, David Fertig, Paul J. Hopper and Robert W. Murray (2015),
Hermann Paul’s’ Principles of Language History Revisited: Translations and
Reflections, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language, New York: Holt. (A general introduction
but with lots on sound change and historical linguistics generally.)
Bowern, Claire and Bethwyn Evans, eds. (2015), The Routledge Handbook of
Historical Linguistics, London: Routledge.
Bybee, Joan (2015), Language Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
4 Sound Change
Campbell, Lyle (2013), Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 3rd edn,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Crowley, Terry and Claire Bowern (2010), An Introduction to Historical
Linguistics, 4th edn, New York: Oxford University Press.
Hale, Mark (2007), Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method, Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Hock, Hans Henrich (1991), Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd edn, Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Hoenigswald, Henry M. (1960), Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Honeybone, Patrick and Joseph Salmons, eds. (2015), The Oxford Handbook of
Historical Phonology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joseph, Brian and Richard Janda, eds. (2003), The Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell. Second volume, 2020.
King, Robert D. (1969), Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Lass, Roger (1997), Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lehmann, Winfred P. (1973), Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd edn,
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
McMahon, April (1994), Understanding Language Change, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ringe, Don and Joseph Eska (2013), Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-
First Century Reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sihler, Andrew L. (2000), Language History: An Introduction, Amsterdam: John
Benjamins
Sturtevant, Edgar (1917), Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical
Study of Language, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Second, most readers of this book will have knowledge of and interest in
some language(s). This is a chance to get a history of such a language, or much
better, a handful of them. For now, look at some sections on sound change
and related material in those resources just to gauge how they are approaching
things:
• To what extent is the presentation descriptive versus theoretically
motivated?
• Is the work situated in a cross-linguistic context or is discussion restricted
to the language at hand?
• To what extent is the presentation of structure and social history integrated
versus segregated, assuming both are present?
If you’ve got some experience in the field, take some of your favorite papers
and maybe some of your least favorite papers on sound change and do the same.
I’m not suggesting being critical of any particular approach – a wide range of
approaches will be appropriate depending on audience and goals of a language
history – but I am urging you to start thinking about how sound change is being
presented and why.
Preface 5
Possible books to draw on (languages, families, areas). These represent a
wide range of views and only a fraction of what’s out there, and often works that
happen to be ones I know. I’ve limited these to English texts but works in other
languages obviously provide particularly valuable contrasts and comparisons.
African languages
• Dimmendaal, Gerrit (2011), Historical Linguistics and the Comparative
Study of African Languages, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Algonquian
• Goddard, Ives (1979), ‘Comparative Algonquian’, in The Languages
of Native America, ed. Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, Austin:
University of Texas Press, pp. 70–132.
• Oxford, Will (2015), ‘Patterns of contrast in phonological change: Evidence
from Algonquian vowel systems’, Language 91, 308–58.
• Pentland, David (1979), ‘Algonquian historical phonology’, dissertation,
University of Toronto.
Arabic
• Al-Wer, Enam and Uri Horesh, eds. (2019), The Routledge Handbook of
Arabic Sociolinguistics, New York: Routledge. (Especially valuable for
variation and change.)
• Owens, Jonathan (2006), A Linguistic History of Arabic, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
• Versteegh, Kees (2014), The Arabic Language, 2nd edn, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Australian
• Bowern, Claire and Harold Koch, eds. (2004), The Australian Languages,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Basque
• Hualde, José Ignacio, Joseba A. Lakarra and Robert L. Trask, eds. (1996),
Towards a History of the Basque Language, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chinese
• Baxter, William H. and Laurent Sagart (2014), Old Chinese: A New
Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
English
• van Gelderen, Elly (2006), A History of the English Language, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
6 Sound Change
• Van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los, eds. (2006), The Handbook of the
History of English, Oxford: Blackwell.
• Minkova, Donka (2014), A Historical Phonology of English, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
• Nevalainen, Terttu and Elizabeth Traugott, eds. (2012), The
Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
French
• Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1996), A History of the French Language through
Texts, London: Routledge.
• Posner, Rebecca (1997), Linguistic Change in French, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
• Rickard, Peter (1989), A History of the French Language, 2nd edn, New
York: Routledge.
German
• Keller, R.E. (1978), The German Language, London: Faber &
Faber.
• Salmons, Joseph (2018), A History of German: What the Past
Reveals about Today’s Language, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
• Waterman, John (1991), A History of the German Language, revised edn,
Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Indo-European
• Beekes, Robert and Michiel de Vaan (2011), Comparative Indo-
European Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
• Clackson, James (2007), Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Collinge, N.E. (1985), The Laws of Indo-European, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
(The laws in question offer a list of potential research topics.)
• Fortson, Benjamin (2009), Indo-European Language and Culture: An
Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Kapović, Mate, ed. (2017), The Indo-European Languages, 2nd edn, New
York: Routledge.
• Sihler, Andrew (2008), New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Japanese
• Frellesvig, Bjarke and John Whitman, eds. (2008), Proto-Japanese,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Preface 7
North Germanic languages
• Haugen, Einar (1976), The Scandinavian Languages: An Introduction to
Their History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Romance
• Alkire, Ti and Carol Rosen (2010), Romance Languages: A Historical
Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Maiden, Martin, John Charles Smith and Adam Ledgeway, eds. (2010),
The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Vol. 1: Structures,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Semitic
• Huehnergard, John and Na’ama Pat-El, eds. (2019), The Semitic Languages,
2nd edn, New York: Routledge.
Slavic
• Carleton, Terence (1991), Introduction to the Phonological History of the
Slavic Languages, Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers.
Spanish
• Hartman, Steven Lee (1974), ‘An outline of Spanish historical phonology’,
Research on Language & Social Interaction 7(1–2), 123–91.
• Lloyd, Paul M. (1987), From Latin to Spanish: Historical Phonology
and Morphology of the Spanish Language, Philadelphia, PA: American
Philosophical Society.
• Penny, Ralph (1991), A History of the Spanish Language, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Yiddish
• Jacobs, Neil G. (2005), Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (Good, brief discussions of historical phonol-
ogy over several chapters.)
• Weinreich, Max (2008), History of the Yiddish Language, translated by
Shlomo Nobel, edited by Paul Glasser, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, in cooperation with YIVO.
1
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Introduction: What is Sound Change
and How Do We Understand It?
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IPA chart with sounds
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart
Metal umlaut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
1. Digging deeper: Data
Umlaut occurs in any number of languages around the world and vowel harmony
in many more. Beyond Germanic, Svan and Rotuman, processes called umlaut
are found in Chamorro, Korean, Tocharian, and some Australian languages,
for example. The Arabic process called imala (Owens 2006: chapter 7) shows
some similarities to umlaut as well. Search for language names and ‘umlaut’ in
research-oriented search engines to find literature. Look at a couple of such cases
and see whether they allow the same kind of story I’ve told about Germanic for
how umlaut has developed and changed in those languages.
2. Digging deeper: Theory
I defined ‘sound change’ in this chapter, but definitions vary across the field.
Starting from books on historical linguistics (modern handbooks, for example)
and classic works in the field (Saussure, Bloomfield, others), look at how other
people define the field and how those definitions are underpinned in terms of their
theories of sounds and language generally.
Here are a few examples from different moments in the field from leading
lights. Understanding these is a tall order, but it would give you a tremendous
foundation:
• Hermann Paul has a long chapter on ‘Phonetic change,’ where he grap-
ples at length with defining sound change, including good discussion of
earlier history. His own views are understood in very different ways by
Introduction 9
various scholars today, as you can see from Robert Murray’s chapter in
the volume.
• Leonard Bloomfield’s chapter on ‘Phonetic change’ may cover more than
simply phonetic change. His index entry for sound change gives you a set
of examples where he contrasts it with other kinds of change, especially
analogy and borrowing.
• Paul Kiparsky’s dissertation, ‘Phonological change,’ provides the classic
early generative statement about sound change with direct comparison to
what he calls ‘imperfect learning.’
• Labov has always paid close attention to the history of the field and his
2020 article provides an excellent contemporary statement of how he sees
the ‘fundamental mechanism’ of sound change, namely the transition
problem.
3. Moving beyond what we know
• Assuming you have language histories at hand (see ‘Beyond this book’
in the Preface), take some major example of sound change in language
histories and look at the range of approaches considered and what
approaches are not considered. You might even look into some specialist
literature (starting with a web search for recent articles) to see what range
of accounts are out there. A few suggestions:
• English: The Great Vowel Shift
• Any Germanic language: Grimm’s Law, aka the First Consonant Shift,
or spirantizations in any family
• French and other languages that have them: The rise of nasalized vowels
• Spanish and many other languages: Weakening of stop consonants
• Russian: Palatalization
• Chinese and any tone language: The rise of distinctive tones
• The example of Svan umlaut is one of many places where earlier work
feels like an invitation to do a full analysis. We have descriptions of
Svan umlaut, but essentially no broader theoretical interpretation of the
story, e.g. how it compares to and might inform our analysis of umlaut in
Germanic and other languages. Umlaut in Rotuman has been discussed
more often in the theoretical literature, but warrants further work as well.
Do the analysis.
• I have tried hard to give fair assessments of various approaches to sound
change, but the nuance and complexity of current views go far beyond
what I can convey. If you find any of these ideas promising, you should dig
into the primary literature, like Pouplier (2012), for instance, on ‘ease of
articulation,’ or Oxford (2015) on how contrast informs our understanding
of sound change, or doesn’t.
• There are sharp contrasts, as I argue, in terms of the role assigned to ‘func-
tion’ in sound change, e.g. across Ohala, Labov, Vennemann. But what do
these and other scholars actually mean by ‘function’?
2
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The History of the Field and Why You
Need to Understand It
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1. Digging deeper: Data
Starting from your language histories, look for examples of sound change
and what wrinkles or ‘exceptions’ are discussed, looking especially for things
labeled ‘sporadic’ or ‘irregular.’ Do you think they could be accounted for in
terms of borrowing, social differentiation, etc., or do they represent challenges to
Neogrammarian regularity that you can see?
The classic examples here are metathesis and dissimilation. Web searches will
show that there’s a rich general and theoretical literature on how to understand
both of these, and those works discuss a wide range of data, but there’s a lot to
be gained by closer examination of patterns in particular languages, both for
sharpening theories and for deepening understanding of particular languages.
2. Digging deeper: Theory
Start reading your way into the regularity debate. An excellent place to start is
Labov (2020). You might read one or two of the pieces he critiques that argue for
lexical diffusion. Based on what you see, is sound change ‘regular’ in the relevant
sense? What kind of evidence would you want to see to increase your confidence
in your answer?
If you want to be thinking about particular examples while you do this, think
about English ‘diatones,’ the noun/verb pairs that vary by stress, like permit,
address, progress, conflict, combat.
3. Moving beyond what we know
It’s valuable to know the history of research on any question. Compare language
histories from two or three different periods and how they present some sound
change like those discussed so far.
• How do theoretical notions inform discussion?
• Are there changes in the data presented and how data get presented?
Understanding the History of the Field 11
• Is the context of the change – how it connects to morphology, regional
variation, social variation – static or does it change over time?
You may hear comments about older works being heavily descriptive and not
very theoretical, but I often find that they are surprisingly theoretical in terms of
the theories of their day. For the languages and families I know best, there are
often profound changes in how social history is treated, e.g. in the increasing
movement away from a focus on standard languages and top-down change driven
by elites toward looking more closely at variation and change from below.
3
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Segmental Sound Change
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Sindhi stops
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/sindhi/sinhi.html
Sound Comparisons Project (Max Planck Institute)
https://soundcomparisons.com/
1. Digging deeper: Data
Most language histories note some changes and types of changes that are seen
as less common: dissimilation, fortition, addition of new codas. Try to find some
examples: Do they change how you think about the notion of ‘common’ sound
changes?
2. Digging deeper: Theory
I’ve mentioned a couple of interesting recent studies of lenition above, like Katz
(2016) and Cohen Priva and Gleason (2020). Take some example of lenition and
look for ways to test their views.
Taking Cohen Priva and Gleason’s analysis of lenition as shortening as a start-
ing point, are there patterns traditionally treated as lenition that do not look like
they involve changes in duration?
Can you extend these views to better understand fortition, e.g. test whether
fortition might involve lengthening, always or usually?
3. Moving beyond what we know
Take one or more of your language histories and skim through sound
changes.
1 How easy is it to classify them along the lines developed in this chapter?
How many involve multiple types of change (like umlaut does with assimi-
lation, deletion, phonemic split)?
Segmental Sound Change 13
2 Does the overall picture line up with what this chapter describes from
previous research, for example in terms of frequency of particular types of
changes, regularity or irregularity of particular types, and so on?
3 Are there any broader patterns that emerge, for example that the language
shows repeated changes of the same type or changes that seem to ‘con-
spire,’ where different changes all seem to yield some general outcome,
like creating open syllables or other prosody?
For the last question, you might look at the discussions of conspiracies in Hock
(1991), McMahon (1994) and Lass (1997) (cited above in the resources for the
Preface). A classic exploration of conspiracies is Murray and Vennemann (1983).
4
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Sound Change Beyond the Segment
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1. Digging deeper: Data
Change in stress and metrical systems has been unevenly investigated across the
languages of the world, especially in terms of using modern views of metrical and
stress theory. Hayes (1995) gives an excellent starting point for understanding the
synchronic systems – with some attention to history. Compare his synchronic
analysis to what you find in language histories. There are lots of contributions to
be made in understanding particular languages and language families.
For example, he deals with Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Bantu, Algonquian and Indo-
European examples, all families where we have enough previous work on history
to open the door for work on metrical historical phonology.
2. Digging deeper: Theory
The idea of language change organized around prosodic templates – their emer-
gence, changes in templates or loss of templates – has hardly begun. A careful
reading of Smith and Ussishkin (2015) can give you a springboard into finding
such patterns and using templates to understand them in many languages.
Here’s a bold claim: Looking at foot structure and other prosodic units can
yield more unified understanding of segmental changes – often conspiracies,
sometimes previously unrecognized ones – in the history of most families. Prove
me wrong, or supplement our growing catalog of prosodic-templatic changes.
3. Moving beyond what we know
• To what extent do your language histories deal with factors ‘above the
segment’ in treating sound change? Is there explicit discussion of prosody
and/or metrical structure?
• Many languages have undergone restructuring of stress systems, changes
in syllable and foot structure, loss or development of distinctive tones or
changes in the tone system, and so on. After reading this chapter, do you
see any of new angles for thinking about these?
Sound Change Beyond the Segment 15
• It seems clear that ‘ebb and flow’ changes and ‘stalled’ changes are under-
discussed for many or most languages. Can you find further examples? Are
there good ways to account for them?
• A good account of *k loss in Algonquian would be a serious contribution.
5
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Evidence for Sound Change
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Old High German glosses (in German)
https://glossenwiki.phil.uni-augsburg.de/wiki/index.php?title=Hauptseite
Mycenean database
https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/damos/
Wells’s vowel classes
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/stanlexsets.htm
University of Edinburgh Phonetics Recording Archive
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/stanlexsets.htm
1. Digging deeper: Data
Minkova (2015, but also in many passages of 2014) gives an exemplary discus-
sion of how to interpret orthography for understanding historical change in
English. You might explore applying her approaches and principles to earlier
spelling of other languages.
I doubt we have many datasets as good as the one for the Queen’s speech used
by Harrington and colleagues – not just the same speaker over time, but regularly
recordings of basically one type of speech – but it’s not hard to find samples of
the same speaker over long stretches of time. Track down some and start looking
at how the person’s speech has changed over time. At this point, don’t worry
about acoustic analysis, just impressions of what sounds different to you in any
systematic way.
2. Digging deeper: Theory
In the chapter, I mentioned the controversies around using typology in the recon-
struction of the Indo-European obstruent system. Kümmel’s work (as cited and
in other work) is a particularly valuable entry into that discussion. Since I wrote
the manuscript, a new work has appeared that deals with these issues directly,
Evidence for Sound Change 17
Na’ama Pat-El’s ‘Typological approaches and historical linguistics’ in The
Handbook of Historical Linguistics, vol. II. These two scholars present current
but distinct views on the topic.
After reading those, do you have a sense of how typology should (not) be
used in reconstruction? In your language histories, is typology being used for
reconstruction? If so, how? Can that be improved on?
3. Moving beyond what we know
How can you use the tools described in this chapter to advance understanding of
some particular problem in languages that you’re working with or looking at? For
example (and these are only examples):
• Are there corpora you can use to track some sound change(s)? Do some
brief searches to look at changes that might be trackable.
• What real-time resources exist, written and audio? If you can access audio
material, listen to some of the earliest for features that don’t sound like
what you hear in the same area today.
For English, Hickey’s Listening to the Past (2017a) provides good examples, but
resources exist for many languages today and more are emerging quickly.
6
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The Learner
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1. Digging deeper: Data
The summary overview of changes by age given in (11) in the book makes pretty
strong claims about what changes how and when over the lifespan. It suggests
two kinds of follow-on data projects:
• First, looking at literature that rejects all or most claims about a critical
period and/or that argues for change later in life, can you reconcile such
work with this graphic?
• Second, can you find phenomena that challenge my scenario directly?
2. Digging deeper: Theory
Read a couple of the works cited in this chapter about the relationship between
first (or second) language acquisition and sound change. How could we improve
on testing this relationship? For instance, should we really expect acquisition to
closely parallel the ultimate outcomes of sound change? Or should we be looking
at how re-analyses made by children look like sound changes?
Over time, theories and concepts typically get refined and developed. Those
who believe in universal grammar today, for instance, mean something very dif-
ferent by that than what early generative work did. (Recall the brief discussion
in Chapter 3 about Chomsky 2005.) Can earlier views about ‘imperfect learning’
be modified and brought into line with what we understand about acquisition and
change today?
3. Moving beyond what we know
• Labov (1994: chapter 5) and others have noted sets of languages that show
vocalic chain shifts, mostly in Germanic but also other languages, almost
all in Europe (1994: 122). We need to build our set of examples in other
languages and language families of the world. Find and describe a novel
example.
The Learner 19
• One test of the ‘skewing’ claims discussed in the chapter is whether com-
munities without patterns of child-directed speech like those in much
of American English show persistent changes like English vowel shifts.
Survey work on child-directed speech in different languages and cultures
in search of possible correlations to persistent shifting of the type found in
Germanic.
7
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Society
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1. Digging deeper: Data
A huge issue in the study of change in progress is gender, with, most notably,
young women typically leading in sound change. In languages and communities
you know, how strong is that pattern?
Most of that work has been done assuming gender as a binary, which research-
ers generally no longer do. (There’s still relatively limited work on this with
regard to sound change, but Podesva and Van Hofwegen 2014 provide a good
overview.) Do you see ways that the increasingly complex interpretation of
gender identity can change this picture?
2. Digging deeper: Theory
People like Van Coetsem, Winford and Matras – all cited in this chapter – have
really advanced our understanding of language change in contact settings, though
often not with a particular focus on sound change. Read some of that work and
look at where accounts of sound change could be sharpened.
3. Moving beyond what we know
• For years I have tried to convince colleagues and students that ‘prestige’
is a counterproductive notion for motivating language change, probably
a nonsensical one at its core. People don’t necessarily roll their eyes,
but a lot of them do continue appealing to the notion. Prove me wrong!
Take a couple of language histories and search for the term ‘prestige.’ Are
there better – more direct and explicit – ways of accounting for whatever
change is motivated that way in the text? Or is ‘prestige’ really the best
story? If it is, how to you address the various shortcomings that Milroy and
others have raised with the notion?
• In the language histories you’re working with, how many sound changes
run counter to standards and norms and prescriptions or are claimed to?
You may need to look at relatively recent changes, since we often lack
Society 21
good information about language ideologies and attitudes farther back in
the past.
• In a sense, for a community with a tightly codified standard, any change
runs counter to the standard. In practice, though, standards change over
time, sometimes more than we realize. Drawing on canonical works for
some standard language over time, sketch some differences over time.
Are there identifiable characteristics of changes that do or don’t make
it into newer works, e.g. borrowing vs. native innovation and potential
‘simplifications’?
• I’ve mentioned twice the borrowing of /ʒ/ into English from French. If
you read the specialist literature, like Minkova (2014: 141–3), you’ll find
that there’s some more texture to the story. For example, the French word
for pleasure today has a [z]. Similarly, we have a set of French loans in
English that have [ʃ] where French has [s], like our words sugar and sure.
Track down the histories of such words and those two sounds. How does
contact interact with structural and other social factors in such cases?
8
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Phonetics and Sound Change
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1. Digging deeper: Data
I think most language histories talk about at least some sound changes basically
in terms of phonology, changes in contrast or features. If you find such examples,
what kinds of phonetic accounts could be used to advance the story?
2. Digging deeper: Theory
Many readers at this point have some ties to some bigger view of sound pat-
terns, often ingested from lectures and course readings in linguistics classes from
introductory courses on. Whatever your perspective may be, look at foundational
works and start laying out how you understand the relationship between phonet-
ics and phonology (in the senses I’ve been using those terms).
3. Moving beyond what we know
Take a couple of examples of sound change from language histories and/or the
technical literature. Look at the role of phonetics in the account of these changes:
• Are phonetics and phonology clearly distinguished or not?
• If not, can you sort out a distinction?
• Is the account balanced in including phonetics and phonology?
• What about other facets?
It’s common for language histories to have somewhat outdated analyses and
many of those have not been addressed in recent research. If you have some
background in phonetics, look for older accounts of sound change where contem-
porary knowledge can help us sharpen and revise those accounts.
9
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Phonology and Sound Change
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1. Digging deeper: Data
If you’ve been engaging with these sections along the way, you now have a set
of sound changes that you understand. The notion of ‘phonological activity’
used here is still relatively new and hasn’t been applied explicitly to many sound
changes. Can you interpret any of the changes you’ve been looking at in terms of
phonological activity? Do any of them raise potential questions or problems for
how I’ve sketched phonological activity in sound change? Can you resolve them?
2. Digging deeper: Theory
Read into the theory of contrast sketched here, drawing on Dresher, Hall, Purnell
et al., and others. The principles proposed by Oxford (2015) especially show
great promise for advancing our understanding of many sound changes. Taking
some relatively simple dataset, can you provide an analysis of the sort that
Oxford does for Algonquian vowels? Do you encounter issues that challenge his
principles?
3. Moving beyond what we know
• I’ve suggested above that the examples discussed are more easily captured
by positing phonology in a robust and fairly traditional system. In some
cases, like with rhotics or ATR reversal, I don’t see how we would account
for the patterns without phonology. Maybe you can?
• Many readers of this volume will find my dismissal of Optimality Theory
too hasty. If you’re invested in OT, make the counter-case! I suspect that
you can describe sound changes with OT without too much difficulty, but
is the analysis actually preferable in any substantive way?
• Read Eckert and Labov (2017) and compare their proposal to how I’ve
presented the relationship between specification and variation here. Are
they compatible? Maybe they even enhance one another?
10
e
Sound Change Beyond the Sound
System
e
Old English text (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)
https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/anglo_chron.htm
1. Digging deeper: Data
Some have argued that sound change can be morphologically conditioned. A
search for claims of morphological conditioning of sound change will yield a
lot, quite possibly for languages you’re interested in. Find and probe a couple
of those.
2. Digging deeper: Theory
I have laid out the bare bones of how I see grammar as it bears on sound change:
Modular, with robust phonetic and phonological components, and so on. Many
readers will be used to working with very different models of grammar. If you’re
one of those people, look for places where your views do or don’t fit with what’s
presented here. Do you see good historical tests that would distinguish the two
views?
3. Moving beyond what we know
If you have some background in a particular phonological theory (or more than
one!), how does it handle sound change and connect to understanding sound
change?
11
e
Conclusion: Toward a Synthesis
e
I urge you to go out and test claims and arguments in this book. I’ve worked
to assemble a lot of pieces, using a lot of tools, but even as I write I know I’ve
missed some, some of them important connections and tools. Find those missed
connections. By the time you read this, there will be more, and some of the tools
will be better and sharper … better than the stone ones I’m working with.
