Chapter Four

PHONETIC AND PHONEMIC CHANGE

Commentary on Crowley
This chapter discusses six topics.

Phonetic change without phonemic change
Phonetic change with phonemic change
Phonemic loss
Phonemic addition
Rephonemicization
shifts
mergers
splits
This chapter discusses six topics.

1. Phonetic change without phonemic change
Why do languages have
phonological rules?

The explanation is historical: languages constantly
undergo phonetic changes, and these have
cumulative effects upon the system. Minimally,
phonetic change causes dialect differences;
further changes cause systemic alterations
allophones added or lost, forcing restructuring of
the sound system. Periodic restructuring
accounts for language divergence, e.g. Latin
evolved into modern Italian.
Minimally, phonetic changes cause
dialect differences, also called
allophonic rules.
This is what the textbook means by the phrase:
Phonetic change without phonemic change.

For example, the Scottish /r/ is the same as the
North American /r/ except for one small and
some might saylinguistically insignificant
detail: it is pronounced differently.
The explanation is historical.
Every pronunciation difference between two
dialects is the result of phonetic change. This fact
raises two questions:
Which dialect is more conservative (with respect to
this one comparison)?
Which dialect is more innovative (with respect to
this one comparison)?
Scottish trilled /r/ is conservative; North
American /r/ is innovative.

Logically, of course, it is possible that neither dialect is
conservative, because both are innovative. This idea
was introduced by Sir William Jones about the
relationship of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.

Phonetic change can also lead to
structural changes, in 5 ways.

2. Phonemic loss
3. Phonemic addition
Rephonemicization
4. shifts
5. mergers
6. splits
Crowleyan Howlers

On p. 74 Crowley says that Phonemic loss is
self-explanatory and on the same page he says
Phonemic addition is also self-explanatory.

In my personal experience, any sentence I have
ever read containing the word phoneme or
phonemic is not self-explanatory.

Crowleys discussion on p. 74 is clear and
accurate; you may judge for yourself whether it is
self-explanatory.
Phonemic loss can be partial or total.
Small phonetic changes can, over time, alter the
phonological system.
For example, the inventory of phonemes can be
reduced through total loss of all allophones of a
phoneme. Thus Motu was described in Chapter 2
as having lost the velar nasal via unconditioned
change: * > .
This change altered the inventory of phonemes,
reducing it by one phoneme.

Phonemic loss can be partial.

Much more common is partial loss of a phoneme,
meaning that an allophone disappeared. For
example, in Rejang, final *-l disappeared in all
native words: *l > /__#. Elsewhere, /l/ was
retained.

More radically, in many Oceanic languages, all
final consonants disappeared: *C > /__#. For
each such language, every consonant phoneme
lost one allophone.

NEVER FORGET: PHONEMES
CHANGE (ONE ALLOPHONE AT A
TIME)

A phoneme is a bunch of allophonesup to ten
or more.
Partial loss of a phoneme means one allophone
disappears, e.g. word-initially. The inventory of
phonemes is unaffected.
Total loss of a phoneme means all allophones of
a phoneme disappear. In this case, the inventory
of phonemes is affectedit has been reduced by
one.

PHONEMIC ADDITION
Again, phonemic addition can be partial or total.
Partial phonemic addition means a new allophone
is added; this does not alter the inventory of
phonemes.
Total phonemic addition means that a new
phoneme is added, increasing the number of
phonemes in the system.
Prothesis means adding a sound at
the beginning of a word. It may or
may not add a new phoneme to a
language.
Motu added a new phoneme /l/ before word-initial /a/:
> l /#__a.
Before the change, /l/ did not exist in Motu, so this change
added a new phoneme to the language.

Rejang added a new allophone [] before word-initial
vowels:
> /#__V.
Before the change, Rejang already had glottal stop
between vowels and word-finally, so this change did not
add a new phoneme to the language.
Amazingly, prothesis may occur
without adding either a phoneme
or an allophone.
Does Crowley really think this is self-explanatory?

Crowleys example is Mpakwithi (N. Australia) which adds
a prothetic schwa before word-initial fricatives and /r/:
> / #___ fricative
r


Crazy as it may sound, since Mpakwithi does not have a
schwa phoneme, it cannot have a schwa allophone.
Therefore, this change just hangs out there phonemically.
It is an example of phonetic change without phonemic
change.
Ill admit it
The Rejang and Mpakwithi examples might make
you think that linguists have lost their minds.

Actually, it is only synchronic linguists that get all
tangled up like this.

Notice how easy and natural the phenomena are
when viewed simply as sound changes.

PHONETIC DETAIL PERVADES
THROUGHOUT
Dont think this is as an isolated example.

American speech is filled with sounds that never
make it to allophonic status.

For example most Southern American dialects
are like Rejang in that a glottal stop is added
before any word beginning with a vowel: >
/#__V.
In most Southern American dialects a glottal stop is
added before every word beginning with a vowel: >
/#__V.

This change has a profound effect on the
distribution of allophones of /r/.

Consider the distribution of /r/ between Boston
and Atlanta in the sentence: Park your car
in Harvard Yard.
Glottal stop is added before every word
beginning with a vowel: > /#__V.
(Let h represent deleted /r/.)
Boston: Pahk yoah car in Hahvahd Yahd.
Atlanta: Pahk yoah cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

Both Boston and Atlanta have a rule dropping /r/
before a consonant. In Boston, /r/ occurs
between two vowels in the phrase car in (with
smooth onset for in); by contrast, in Atlanta the
sequence is pronounced cah in (with glottal
onset preceding in), in perfect conformity with the
rule.
This chapter discusses six topics.

Rephonemicization
4. shifts
5. mergers
6. splits

These constitute 90% of Historical
Phonology.
These topices are notrepeat notself-
explanatory.
THE IDENTIFICATION OF A SHIFT,
MERGER OR SPLIT DEPENDS ON
THE EFFECT ON THE LANGUAGE
SYSTEM.
Shift: When a series of phonemes change
positions without affecting the number of
phonemes in the system, e.g. Grimms Law and
the Great Vowel Shift.
The most famous shifts are so profound one
might be surprized at the lack of mergers and
splits, which would have resulted in loss or
addition of phonemes. Instead, the phonemes
simply got shifted around inside the articulatory
quadrangle, in a series of movements called a
chain shift.

Famous Chain Shifts
Grimms Law (Germanic)
Second Consonant Shift (Germanic)
Great Vowel Shift (English, 1400-1600) Note:
Chaucer was born in 1400 and Shakespeare died in 1619.
Northern Cities Shift (American English, 1950 -
present)
English represents older
Germanic


English and the Low German languages-Dutch,
Flemish, and Plattdeutsch differ from Modern
Standard German partly because Standard
German has undergone a second or High
German Consonant Shift. English preserves the
older common Germanic sounds which were
changed in High German between the sixth and
the eighth centuries.
Below are some English and High German cognates that show sound correspondence
according to the Second Consonant Shift.
A SHIFT NEED NOT ALTER THE
NUMBER OF PHONEMES IN
THE SYSTEM.
SEE AND HEAR THE GVS


http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/seehear.ht
m

Merger

Mergers in American English


Don/Dawn merge in many dialects of American
English.
pin / pen merge / __n in South Midlands (Athens)
and most of the South.
MERGER
As you might guess, a merger can be partial or
total.

Partial mergers are the most common; the
allophones of two or more phonemes merge, e.g.
C > / ___# (all word-final consonants became
glottal stop in Minangkabau (Sumatra)). The
phonemic inventory was unchanged.

Total mergers also occur, e.g. Ment, in Sarawak,
Borneo, where *l and *r merged as *r. This
change altered the phonemic inventory of Ment,
which now lacks /l/.
Splits




Split

For a phonemic split to occur there must be two
factors in play.

a) A phoneme X undergoes a conditioned change:
X > Z /A__B
b) Z (and X) are phonemes in the language.

Suppose there is a change n > m /__p, as in English:
*in+possible > impossible. It can be said that /n/
has undergone partial split, because one
allophone became /m/ while the rest remained /n/.
Split of *a /__# in Rejang

Rejang underwent a three-way split under complex
conditions:

o *kena > kno strike
*a *ita > it we (incl)
y *mata > maty eye

PHONEMIC CHANGE WITHOUT
PHONETIC CHANGE
Watch out for linguist-speak. Dont be taken in by
the smooth talk. Broadly speaking, what the
above implies is impossible. But speaking very
narrowly, Crowley means that a sound can be re-
classified without ITSELF undergoing any
change. The re-phonemicization change may
simply occur elsewhere in the language.
Consider what happens to the books
in the library.

In a local library, Book A was displayed in a
section called Young Adult and Book B was
displayed under Adult Fiction.
Some parents complained that Adult Fiction
sounded like dirty books, which they werent.
Nevertheless, to avoid confusion the Library
changed the display to read: Young Adult and
New Fiction.
In this way, the books were re-classified without
any change in the books themselves.
Consider how // became a
phoneme of English.
Step 1: OE had disyllables like /singe/ [sige].
Step 2: Middle English lost final -e by apocope, causing words to acquire a final
CC: /sing/ [sig].
Step 3: Modern English simplified the consonant cluster by dropping the final -g,
but kept the velar pronunciation of the nasal: /si/.
Step 4: Linguists recognized// as a new phoneme with a limited distribution
(cannot begin a syllable).
Psycholinguistic test
What is your aptitude for learning Tagalog?

unit now
aa gape
umaaa chew thoroughly
[u.ma..a]
End of Chapter Four



Historical Linguistics
Winter 2009