Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

David Peterson sikyal:

> Isidora wrote:
>
> Mmm...   I don't know about this.   The first thing that raised a red flag
> was when you said *phonology* professor (1).   This sounds like a version of the
> "lazy speaker" hypothesis, which is basically "anything that's difficult will
> fall out of a language".
> [snip lots of stuff about Italian]
>
> Also, consider that Arabic still has a full set of pharyngealized stops.
> These sounds are "difficult" to pronounce, but only to people who don't have
> them.   They're not a problem to Arabic speakers, and so they've endured
> throughout the years.
>
> I think my main point is that children's aquisition of their phonology should
> *not* be consider a vehicle for sound change.   If it were, then all
> languages would probably have their phonologies reduced very quickly--the English /r/
> would be one of the first things to go (having three simultaneous
> places/manners of articulation--one of the rarest sounds in th world's languages, though
> I've seen data of other languages with it).
I disagree completely--I think that children's acquisition of phonology
should be considered *the* vehicle for sound change. The problem is that
arguments based solely on ease of articulation or on acoustic saliency are
both too reductionistic. *Both* processes are necessary, and the conflict
between these is what drives sound change. Lazy articulation constantly
degrades contrasts and leads to smaller, more basic sets of phonemes. The
demands of acoustic salience and information load support contrasts,
though, and these two things fight each other on and off. The battle can
also go the other way, depending on the situation.

In Italian (and every other language), coda stops are perceptually
difficult to hear, and can be turned to geminates with little loss of
signal. Thus those clusters are reduced. In Arabic, the
difficult-to-pronounce pharyngeals are acoustically prominent and so can't
be lost without loss of too much information.


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://blog.glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues,
Cause it's too hard to count the dead."
 - Jason Webley