Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

At 11:27 AM 11/4/03 +0100, you wrote:
>I was looking at a chart of reflexes of PIE and Proto-Semitic consonants the
>other day, and noted that while, say, the ancestral velar stops are mangled
>wantonly in many daughter languages, *m and *n are perserved in every language
>listed (in initial position at least).
>
>Now, is this just a quirk of these particular families, or do different sound
>have differing "intrinsic" probabilities for changing?
Andreas,

I have *no* actual data to back this up, but I am going to venture a guess
that certain sounds are going to be more prone to change, because certain
sounds are inherently more difficult to produce.  The interdental
fricatives are objectively more difficult to pronounce than the alveolar
fricatives.  And that is something that I know know for a fact.  I learned
it from my phonology professor who had specifically studied this phenomenon
and found a correlation between the age at which children learn to
correctly pronounce these marked phonemes and the frequency with which the
same phonemes were found in the world's languages.  In addition to
frequency, there is also a hierarchy: /s/ will be learned before /f/, which
will be learned before /T/, if I am remembering correctly - that was over
ten years ago, after all.  /m/ is one of the first sounds that a baby can
pronounce (thus accounting for the frequency of [ma] as a component in the
word for 'mother' in a lot of unrelated languages.

I would imagine that the sounds that are objectively more difficult to
pronounce would tend to be more prone to change to something easier to
pronounce, but there are plenty of examples of the opposite happening, so I
could be completely wrong.

Isidora

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