Abstract
In this chapter, we look at sound change at the level of articulation. We come to see sound change as an inevitable by-product of being produced by an imperfect human articulatory system, in which neighbouring sounds influence each other in pronunciation. The phonetic basis for sound change suggests that change should be regular and without exceptions; the ‘Neogrammarian hypothesis’ that lies at the comparative foundations of modern historical linguistics. Even seemingly irregular change often turns out to be regular upon further inspection. We see additional regularity in sound change in that many changes follow a unidirectional pattern of lenition, which we discuss as articulatory undershoot. Despite the regularity in phonetic change, whether a change will take root is still a matter of chance, because listeners are quite adept at filtering out such misarticulations.
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Notes
- 1.
Later change in English caused father to be pronounced with /ð/ in present-day English. Regular sound change should have given /fædə/ for father. The /d/ changed to a fricative because that fit the pattern found in other kinship terms such as brother. This is called analogy; see Chapter 8. Brother had /θ/ in early Old English, in accordance with Grimm’s Law, which later changed to /ð/ in regular sound change.
- 2.
Let’s just spell this out for the sake of clarity. [m] is a voiced nasal bilabial stop. If we raise the velum (change nasal to oral) and stop vibrating our vocal folds (change voiced to voiceless), but not move our tongue and lips (no changes to place and manner of articulation), we end up with a voiceless oral bilabial stop, or [p].
- 3.
Apart from our subconscious knowledge of how /ʃ/ and /s/ are affected by surrounding sounds, we also use social information in deciding which sibilant we hear. Men typically pronounce sibilants a bit further back than women do, which is probably to a large extent a physiological process; at least in English, there is also a sexual orientation dimension with gay men pronouncing /s/ further to the front than straight men do—a purely social process, as far as we can tell. These tendencies all play a role simultaneously in speech perception.
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Knooihuizen, R. (2023). Phonetic Change. In: The Linguistics of the History of English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7_3
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