Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

H. S. Teoh sikyal:

> > 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.)
If you google for "phonology order of acquisition", you'll get a wide
variety of papers touching on this phenomenon. Googling "phonology
markedness hierarchy" gets others, which offer varying degrees of
information. I wasn't able to find anything that listed exact orders of
acquisition. However, I was reminded that such heirarchies are actually
fairly controversial--different children acquire sounds in different
orders, and the reasons and justifications for these things aren't always
obvious.

For general purposes, a broad markedness heirarchy is about like the
following:

In order from less marked -> more marked

CONSONANTS

Place of Articulation:
Dental > Labial > Velar > Palatal, Uvular, Glottal > Pharyngeal,
Interdental, Other

Manner of Articulation:
Stops > Fricatives
Nasals > Liquids

Nasals often contrast at fewer PoA's than stops.

Voicing:
Voiceless > Voiced, Aspirated > Other

VOWELS

Basic vowels:
a > i > u

Front unrounded > front rounded
Back rounded > back unrounded
High rounded > Low rounded
Low central > high central

> > 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.
> [snip]
This is mostly right. The problem is that there are multiple different
ways that something can be "unmarked", and rules tend to push segments in
different directions, ending up with things that are marked. It's a tricky
game, sound change, but my favorite one :).


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

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