Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

> > 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.
>
>Do you know where I would find more info about this hierarchy? It sounds
>fascinating. (No pun intended.)
My professor was Dr. Daniel Dinsen at Indiana University, Bloomington.  I
am certain that he has published stuff about this.  My own notes from the
class are hopelessly buried in the overly-full walk-in closet to my young
son's room at the moment.  (I actually know exactly which part of the
closet they are buried in, which helps, but the problem is that they are
literally buried under other things.)  Once the cleaning proceeds to the
point where those boxes have been unearthed, I can locate the notes, which
are all bound together in several smoke-colored report covers (That was the
one semester that I was super-organized.), go through the notes, and, if we
are lucky, find the appropriate material.  I know that there should be a
chart of the hierarchy in there, because I can see it in my mind's eye.  I
can also remember the day that we went over that information in class,
because it is a rather extensive and complex chart, and he was going over
it with us phoneme by phoneme, and Professor Dinsen is blind, and we were
at least two-thirds of the way down the chart when it finally dawned on me
that he had this *memorized*.  He didn't have a sheet of paper in front of
him to work from like we did.  I was fairly impressed.

Isidora