Re: sound change

At 10:27 pm -0400 6/5/01, David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 5/6/01 7:14:34 PM, nsampat@IX.NETCOM.COM writes:
>
><< I was wondering, are words used often more or less prone to sound change?
>
>Is there a safe generalization for this, or is the tendency radically
>different for different situations?
>
>Assuming the second is true, is there likely to be a set of rules that will
>determine the proneness-to-change of a given word, given sufficient
>information? >>
>
>    I vote for often-used words being more prone to sound change.  It
>certainly explains the irregular German, Spanish and English verbs and some
>of the irregular root changes in Arabic.
I think it's rather that often-used words are more likely to retain
irregularities thrown up by sound changes.

As I understand it, sound changes like the great vowel shift of the Tudor
period in England, and the sound shift affecting plosive/ fricative
consonants in the Germanic languages do affect all words with those sounds,
whether used frequently or not.

But such sound changes can then create morphological irregularities; e.g.
the regular sound changes from Vulgar Latin to modern Romance affected
stressed vowels in a different way to unstressed vowels.  this meant that a
pattern that was perfectly regular in Latin became irregular, cf. the
alternation of {ue} and {o} in the Spanish present tense:
duermo     dormimos
duermes    dormís
duerme     duermen

Stressed VL /O/ has become /ue/ and unstressed VL /O/ has become /o/.  This
is precisely what the sound changes predict, but it makes a regular tense
(as, e.g. in CL _dormio_) become irregular.

We see similar things in French, cf:
je viens           nous venons
tu viens           vous venez
il/elle vient      ils/elles viennent

But against this another trend, that of anology, is working to counteract
such irregularities.  For example, sound change alone would mean that while
we say _j'aime_, the plural would be *_nous amons_, and while we have _nous
parlons_, the singular would be *_je parole_; but these verbs have
re-regularized.

What we can say is that irregularities caused by sound change is more like
to stay with commonly used words.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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