Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

Andreas Johansson sikyal:

> 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?
Yes, different sounds have different probabilities of changing. This
generally correlated with markedness: highly marked sounds are likely to
change into less marked sounds, while unmarked sounds are less likely to
change. (I say "less likely", because everything changes eventually).

Nasals are known for being resistant to certain kinds of change, so this
is hardly surprising. Google, unfortunately, doesn't show anything
extraordinarily helpful with regards to other things like this, except for
this fascinating paper on the emergence and persistence of clicks:

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/engstrand97why.html


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